Commentary
The former general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) died of leukemia on Nov. 30; and according to the news report, a national funeral service was held on Dec. 6 in Beijing. To me, what Jiang Zemin really deserved is a criminal trial.
Because all media and information have been tightly controlled by the Chinese communist regime since taking power in 1949, many people in both the domestic and international communities have no idea what each individual leader of the CCP has done to their own people, especially Jiang. After Chairman Mao died in 1976, gradually information began to surface about the disastrous loss of Chinese life in different political movements and the ensuing turmoil during the late dictator’s rule. Around 80 million Chinese — more than the casualties of both world wars — are the sacrifices of the CCP’s malicious rule, which can be summed up as deceit, maliciousness, and struggle.
- Jiang Zemin, Former CCP Leader Notorious for ‘Rule by Corruption’ and Persecution of Falun Gong, Dead of Leukemia at 96
- Exiled Chinese Jurist Describes the Pernicious Legacy of Jiang Zemin
Jiang may have presided over Communist China’s economic “engagement” with the West, but he did not deviate from the Party’s basic anti-human nature — in fact, he unleashed policies of such unimaginable horror that they surpass even the crimes of Mao and will one day be recognized as a unique evil in the pages of history.
It was the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989 that saw Jiang rise to power — by burnishing his political credentials as a supporter of the Party leadership’s decision to crack down on the pro-democracy movement throughout China. Ten years later, Jiang launched a brutal persecution against the peaceful adherents of Falun Gong in July 1999 on the simple justification that the numbers of people practicing its meditation exercises and following the core principles of truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance was between 70 and 100 million people — or more than the 66 million registered Communist Party memberships at the time.
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The genocidal campaign against Falun Gong encouraged various levels of police and administration to employ inhuman torture to force adherents to renounce their faith and way of life. Millions of illegally detained innocent people have been sentenced to up to 20 years in prison and forced to labor in their custody, benefitting the Chinese economy.
In its effort to exterminate Falun Gong, Jiang’s regime also unleashed an unprecedented horror upon Chinese society. An independent UK-based tribunal has confirmed that many practitioners who would not give up the practice were summarily executed by having their organs have been forcibly extracted and sold to the international transplant market at high prices. This atrocity has spread to target not just Falun Gong practitioners but other prisoners of conscience, the Uyghur minority, and perhaps even everyday Chinese.
Outside China, Jiang used the CCP’s authoritarian system and China’s labor and industrial strength to expand Beijing’s economic influence to every corner of the earth in hopes of binding all countries with the CCP. Such highly lucrative businesses have attracted all democratic countries for investment and business development. To build up world power, Jiang sent out Chinese elites to penetrate scientific and research areas of western society, dreaming one day that he and his successors would dominate the world both economically and militarily. In exchange for trade advantages, western democratic countries paid a high price both morally and economically — and later with their health after the CCP covered up the pandemic spreading out of Wuhan. Even when human rights abuse cases leaked out from China, media and western governments would downplay them because they were afraid of losing business ties to Communist China.
Indeed, the world should feel relieved that Jiang has passed. Hopefully, we will live to see the kind of evil thinking he perpetrated also pass away and a better, kinder social order emerge for the Chinese people.
Dr. Wenyi Wang, Ph.D. & M.D.
