Mao Zedong uttered these words many decades ago: “Every communist must grasp the truth, political power grows out of the barrel of a gun. Our principle is that the party commands the gun, and the gun must never be allowed to command the party.” But Mao would have looked up from hell with pride on Tuesday. On the 70th anniversary of the Communist China he founded, political power still prevails through the party’s gun. It is a truth we saw proven by the tanks parading through Tiananmen Square, and a truth proven by an 18-year-old Hongkonger shot at point-blank range.
He’ll never admit it explicitly, but Xi Jinping wants us to know these joined truths. He wants all to know that the party remains supreme, and that all those who oppose it must ultimately be cowed or crushed.
Still, Xi insists that Communist China is a beneficent power. Beijing, he suggests, presents a beacon for a different kind of politics: one in which the citizenry are guided and guarded by the better angels of the party.
But this is the greatest lie. It’s a lie proven by the chaos in Hong Kong.
The shooting on Tuesday shows that the police officer in question wanted to shoot the young man. The video shows the officer surrounded by colleagues and relatively secure. Why did he shoot? Perhaps he was ordered to by Beijing? Or perhaps because this officer is actually a People’s Liberation Army soldier or Ministry of State Security officer in disguise?
Certainly Xi would be proud of this bloody birthday present, this reeducation of the masses that the party will crush all who stand against it.
Communist China’s lie is proven in equal measure by the Tiananmen Square parade.
In that sea of tanks, party foot-soldiers, and submarine-launch nuclear ballistic missiles, we saw the true nature of China’s ambition for the world: An agenda to militarily dominate the Indo-Pacific, and use bribery, coercion, and theft to gradually dominate everyone else. Xi’s ambition is not, as American politics so often is, a politics of the moment.
Instead, it is a politics of dark destiny: a multi-generational struggle to advance China’s authoritarianism and conquer the idea that individual freedom is sacred. As with their Soviet forebearers, Xi and the Party’s Standing Committee stand confidently above the parade route. They, not the people, intend to master China’s future.
America’s truth, then, must hold resolute against this despicable regime. For all our flaws, our democratic constitution and its guardians remain the last best hope on Earth.
