Taipei Times: The 'People's Republic of Terror' [Excerpt]

Wed, 7 Nov 2001

I recall learning the expression "evil [party name omitted] bandits" from my textbooks at a young age, but, to be honest, it is only now that I have slowly come to realize the truth of it. And yet the expression once again has a ring of untruth about it as well because the word "[party name omitted]" refers to the Chinese [party name omitted] Party (CCP) and should imply a belief in [party's ideology omitted]. But the CCP stopped believing in [party's ideology omitted] long ago. So what do they believe in? Some say that at home they stand for "state opportunism" while, overseas, they practice "state terrorism." Actually, they practice "state terrorism" at home as well.

[...]

APEC countries issued a statement at this year's meeting in Shanghai opposing terrorism. It included wording that declared "... anti-terrorism is a fight between justice and evil, and a show of strength of civilization against barbarity, rather than a conflict among different ethnic groups, religions or cultures."

[...] I'm afraid that asking a barbaric country like China to join in the fight against terrorism is totally misguided.

Since the establishment of the PRC, one political movement has followed after another -- the three evils, the five evils, the anti-rightist campaign, the rectification campaign and so on and so on. How many people fell in the resulting carnage? The Cultural Revolution was a 10-year catastrophe. In the Tiananmen Incident in 1989, several hundred thousand combat troops and tanks were deployed to crush city residents and students. If this kind of year-in and year-out abuse and slaughter of their own unarmed citizens isn't state terrorism, then what is it?

The crackdown on Falun Gong followers that began two years ago is an even more quintessential demonstration of "state terror-ism." President Jiang Zemin's government has vowed that it will "ruin Falun Gong followers economically, destroy their reputation and exterminate them physically." Their sexual abuse of female followers is even more blood-curdling and evil than the mistreatment of Chinese women by Japanese soldiers during World War II. What other regime would treat its own people that way?

[...]

This year during World Press Freedom Day on May 1, the Committee to Protect Journalists, which is headquartered in New York, selected 10 "enemies of the press" from around the world. Jiang was chosen -- for the fifth year in a row -- for seriously manipulating domestic media and limiting freedom of speech. He was surpassed only by Iran's Ayatollah Khamenei and Liberia's Charles Taylor.

The committee said that 22 journalists holding "dissident views" were jailed or sentenced to labor reform in China at the end of last year, more than in any other country. In addition, since Jiang fears the Internet will interfere with Beijing's control over information, he has invested tremendous resources to monitor and control the content of domestic Web sites. A number of newspapers that had insisted on editorial independence were forced to close or reorganize their management. Is this not "state terrorism?"

The strange thing is that many media organizations in Taiwan are infatuated with China and take pains to gloss over its state terrorism. What are they doing?

Chang Ching-hsi is a professor in the department of economics at National Taiwan University.

Translated by Ethan Harkness

http://www.taipeitimes.com/news/2001/11/02/story/0000109804