2004 is 1984 in China

I remember reading the book 1984 for the first time in high school. It was a book about a communist-type society which had taken state control to their logical extremes, to the point where The Party was everything. The Ministry of Peace existed to wage war. The Ministry of Truth existed to revise records with lies so that The Party was always right. The Ministry of Plenty existed to cause shortages, so that the people were always dependent on the Party for their bare survival. One of the most haunting scenes in the book is when a member of the Inner Party is speaking to the protagonist and declares that The Party requires absolute victory. Even one person with disloyal thoughts is unacceptable, he declares. Everyone must be purified and everyone must be perfectly loyal. But surely this is only fiction, taken to the extreme to make its point, right? Right?



Nope. In this morning's edition of MSNBC's website, there is an article about a student group in China who has been cracked down upon for disloyalty and sedition. How large was this monstrous threat to the party? 8 people. And of course these must have been violent anarchists willing to do anything to overthrow the government, right? Nope. Most were Communist Party members who wanted to work within the system. Those who were not did not even consider their cause to be significant enough to meet regularly. But it was enough to send most away to prison for 20 years, and to send the informer himself to Taiwan to claim political assylum.



America has ignored the political horrors of Communist China for too long. While we offer them Most Favored Trading Status (or whatever Congress renamed it to, in order to slip it under the press radar), the Communist Government continues to imprison, torture, and murder their own people for the slightest thought of political disloyalty or suggestion of reform. We need not call upon China to completely change their government - they have adopted some reforms already to encourage freedom in the business realm and many Chinese truly like and respect aspects of Communism - but the complete opposition to freedom of thought, freedom of speech, and freedom of religion must be changed.



If China can not count on the superiority of their own ideas, how long can they hope that an iron boot can win the argument for them? Answer: Only as long as we let them do it.