Marching to world domination: China celebrates 60 years of communism

The first tank phalanx receives inspection in a parade of the celebrations for the 60th anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China, on Chang'an Street in central Beijing

China today celebrated its wealth and rising might with a show of goose-stepping troops, gaudy floats and nuclear-capable missiles in Beijing, 60 years after Mao Zedong proclaimed its embrace of communism.

Tiananmen Square became a hi-tech stage to celebrate the birth of the People's Republic of China on October 1, 1949, with President Hu Jintao, wearing a slate grey 'Mao' suit, and the Communist Party leadership watching the meticulously disciplined show from the Gate of Heavenly Peace over the Square. Here DOMINIC SANDBROOK explains why the West should be so wary of the new superpower.

Mao Takes Manhattan: Empire State Building Goes Red and Yellow for China
September 30, 2009

To celebrate the 60th anniversary of the People's Republic of China under Communist rule and Mao's 1949 revolution, the Chinese will hold a military parade in Beijing on Thursday of unparalleled size -- 5,000 soldiers, 43,000 fireworks and a display of 52 new weapons -- followed by a civilian parade of 100,000 marchers and 60 floats, many chanting new nationalistic mantras coined by the Chinese government for the occasion.

For a nation that worships Mao, and the path of development and prosperity the Chinese people believe he charted, nothing less would do to commemorate its 60th anniversary.

But when it comes to the commemoration of China's 60th anniversary in the U.S., perhaps we could -- and should -- expect a little less.

Wednesday night in New York City, the Empire State Building will illumine its familiar spire with red and yellow lights in honor of Communist China. The Communism-themed color scheme will stay lit through Thursday night, much to the delight of China's consular officials, who were on hand for a ceremony in the lobby of the iconic building Wednesday morning, and to the acute dismay of the dozen or so protesters outside, and to many Americans who question whether honoring China's Communist revolution here is at all appropriate.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-flumenbaum/empire-state-building-goe_b_305122.html
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Empire State Building Goes Red for Communist China, Sparking Protest
September 30, 2009

Sept. 30: The Empire State Building lit in red and yellow to honor the 60th anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China.

NEW YORK — New York is seeing red over the decision to turn the city's highest beacon — and one of America's symbols for free enterprise — into a shining monument honoring China's communist revolution Wednesday night.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,557823,00.html?mep
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Mao Tse-Tung

AKA Chairman Mao, AKA 'The Great Helmsman'. (Tse-Tung can also be spelt Zedong. Translated the name means 'To Shine on the East'.)

Country: China

Kill tally: 14 to 20 million deaths from starvation during the 'Great Leap Forward'. Tens of thousands killed and millions of lives ruined during the 'Cultural Revolution'.

http://www.moreorless.au.com/killers/mao.html

From the Sino-Russian Joint Statement of April 23, 1997:
"The two sides [China and Russia] shall, in the spirit of partnership, strive to promote the multipolarization of the world and the establishment of a new international order."
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Central_Asia/HI29Ag01.html
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Russia and China have been holding joint war games every other year since 2005. The latest apparently took place on July 22-27 of this year.

"Russia and China will hold their joint military exercise on July 22-27 on the territories of the two countries. About 3,000 military men, 300 units of military hardware, over 40 planes and helicopters will take part in Peace Mission-2009 drills. About 1,500 servicemen, T-80 tanks, BMP-1 and BTR-70 armored vehicles, 22 aircraft, including two Il-76 cargo planes, five Su-24, five Su-25, five Su-27 fighters and five Mi-8 helicopters will represent Russia in the drills."

http://www.russiansentry.com/?area=postView&id=1409
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Russia, China hold Peace Mission 2009 joint exercise

The exercise involves about 3,000 Russian and Chinese servicemen, nearly 300 units of army military equipment and over 40 fixed-wing aircraft and helicopters. Photo: BMP-86A infantry fighting vehicles of the People's Liberation Army (PLA) of China.

http://en.rian.ru/photolents/20090724/155604547.html
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[2009] Russia, China plan new joint military exercises

By MARTIN SIEFF, UPI Senior News Analyst
Published: March 26, 2009

WASHINGTON, March 26 (UPI) -- The continuing tensions over Russia's refusal to sell its state-of-the-art land warfare advanced weapons systems to China hasn't interrupted the rhythm of major joint military exercises between the two major land powers on the Eurasian landmass. The latest in the regular, biennial series of exercises between the two nations has been confirmed for this summer.

The next in the now well-established series of exercises called Peace Mission 2009 will be carried out in northeastern China, the Russian Defense Ministry announced March 18, according to a report carried by the RIA Novosti news agency.

The first bilateral Peace Mission maneuvers -- described at the time as counter-terrorism exercises -- were held in Russia and the eastern Chinese province of Shandong in August 2005. As we reported at that time, they were a lot bigger than mere counter-terrorism exercises. Warships, squadrons of combat aircraft and more than 10,000 troops were involved carrying out landings against hypothetically hostile shores. The maneuvers also involved large-scale paratroops drops. The scale and nature of those exercises suggested a trial run for a possible Chinese invasion of Taiwan with Russian support. ..."

http://www.upi.com/Security_Industry/2009/03/26/Russia_China_plan_new_joint_military_exercises/UPI-25021238094858/
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Russia, China flex muscles in joint war games
August 17, 2007

CHEBARKUL, Russia (Reuters) - Russia and China staged their biggest joint exercises on Friday but denied this show of military prowess could lead to the formation of a counterweight to NATO.

"Today's exercises are another step towards strengthening the relations between our countries, a step towards strengthening international peace and security, and first and foremost, the security of our peoples," Putin said.

Fighter jets swooped overhead, commandos jumped from helicopters on to rooftops and the boom of artillery shells shook the firing range in Russia's Ural mountains as two of the largest armies in the world were put through their paces.

The exercises take place against a backdrop of mounting rivalry between the West, and Russia and China for influence over Central Asia, a strategic region that has huge oil, gas and mineral resources.

Russia's growing assertiveness is also causing jitters in the West. Putin announced at the firing range that Russia was resuming Soviet-era sorties by its strategic bomber aircraft near NATO airspace.
http://in.reuters.com/article/worldNews/idINIndia-29030120070817?pageNumber=1&virtualBrandChannel=0
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War Games: Russia, China Grow Alliance
September 23, 2005

In foreign policy it’s critical to “know thine enemy.” So American policymakers should be aware that Russia and China are inching closer to identifying a common enemy — the United States.

The two would-be superpowers held unprecedented joint military exercises Aug. 18-25. Soothingly named “Peace Mission 2005,” the drills took place on the Shandong peninsula on the Yellow Sea, and included nearly 10,000 troops. Russian long-range bombers, the army, navy, air force, marine, airborne and logistics units from both countries were also involved.

Moscow and Beijing claim the maneuvers were aimed at combating terrorism, extremism and separatism (the last a veiled reference to Taiwan), but it’s clear they were an attempt to counter-balance American military might.

Joint war games are a logical outcome of the Sino-Russian Friendship and Cooperation Treaty signed in 2001, and reflect the shared worldview and growing economic ties between the two Eastern Hemisphere giants."
http://www.heritage.org/Press/Commentary/ed092605a.cfm

Mao, like Stalin, indisputably murdered more people than Hitler. He tyrannized the world's most populous nation for more than a quarter century; and while by most counts his victims were somewhat less numerous than Stalin's, the range of error makes it quite possible that Mao Zedong was the greatest mass murderer of the century. Mao was both the Lenin and the Stalin of Chinese Communism: not only did he found the system, but he raised it to lethal maturity. While Mao waited a few years to antagonize the peasants with forced collectivization, the killing began immediately. As Laszlo Ladany observes in his The Communist Party of China and Marxism: 1921-1985:

There are few parallels in history for what the [Chinese] Communists did [when they first came to power]. The French Revolution had many victims, but it did not institute a lasting political system. The October Revolution in the Soviet Union was not a peaceful affair, but the mass killings did not come till years later, during Stalin's collectivisation... In China, the terror - what else can one call it? - was widespread and saw the beginning of a lasting system.

After Stalin's death, Khrushchev and his successors eliminated some of the most horrific aspects of his regime. Mao denounced these reforms as "revisionism," studiously repeating each of Stalin's horrors. Unlike Stalin, Mao never fully succeeded in utterly crushing internal opposition within the Chinese Communist Party, which is probably why Mao's policies were not even more deadly than they were.

Deaths due to extreme hardship conditions in slave labor camps:

With the aid of Soviet advisors, Mao set up a Chinese Gulag - an empire of slave labor camps filled with poorly fed "counter-revolutionaries." As under Stalin, the prisoners could be anyone: former landlords, better-off peasants, civil servants under Chiang's regime, and eventually out-of-favor members of the Communist Party itself. By most estimates, the typical slave labor camp population during Mao's reign was between 10 and 15 million. The conditions were deadly, but markedly safer than those experienced by Stalin's Siberian slaves. Annual death rates in the Soviet camps under Stalin ranged from 10-30%, while under Mao the rates were more along the lines of 5-10%. This is partly due to the more favorable climate, but also because Mao was more interested than Stalin in getting work out of his slaves. In any case, these death rates are surely high enough to warrant murder charges for the inmates' deaths - which must have summed to well over 10 million.

* Deaths due to man-made famine:

The bulk of the deaths for which Mao was responsible stemmed from the famines caused by his mad agricultural collectivization program, which surpassed even Stalin's in its totalitarian aspirations. Like Lenin, Mao initially let peasants keep their land; he focused on killing or imprisoning landlords, better- off peasants, and other village leaders who might later resist him. This lasted for a few years; then Mao began to seize the land that he had promised the peasants, and force them into collective farms along Stalinist lines. The job was basically complete by 1956. These collective farms seemed too individualistic to Mao, so he went one step further in 1958 and forced the peasants into "communes." The difference was mainly that all property, not merely the land, became state property:

The peasant was now the property of the commune, to labor like factory workers in teams and brigades at whatever was commanded, to eat in common mess halls, and often to sleep together in barracks. Family life and traditions, personal property and privacy, personal initiative and individual freedom, were destroyed or lost in an instant for around one-seventh of all mankind. (R.J. Rummel, China's Bloody Century)

The communes were just one piece of Mao's overarching plan, the Great Leap Forward. Mao's stated goal was to make enormous advances in agriculture and industry simultaneously. Thus, in addition to setting large food quotas for the communes, villages were also ordered to set up small-scale steel furnaces - using local scrap metal as raw material. The pressure to surpass Mao's quotas led to little production but a great deal of falsified economic statistics. The false numbers were then used in future government plans, exacerbating the disaster which was to come.

Starvation had already set in during the forced collectivization period, just as it had under Stalin. Around five million perished from starvation even before the Great Leap Forward began. The Great Leap Forward turned this river of deaths into a flood, producing what was probably the single greatest famine in human history. From 1959-1963, around 30 million Chinese perished from this man- made famine. While exclusion of foreigners and draconian censorship kept word of this famine from the West for many years, in recent periods historians, demographers, and the Chinese government itself have given the world ample evidence of Mao's most horrible crime. Yet at the time experts were incredulous. "A BBC commentator - giving the opinion general among China experts - declared that widespread famine in such a well-organized country was unthinkable." (Laszlo Ladany, The Communist Party of China and Marxism: 1921-1985) The stories of recent emigres were shocking:

Peasants lacked the strength to work, and some collapsed in the fields and died. City government organisations and schools sent people to the villages by night to buy food, bartering clothes and furniture for it. In Shenyang the newspaper reported cannibalism. Desperate mothers strangled children who cried for food. Many reported that villagers were flocking into the cities in search of food; many villages were left empty, only the old people who were not strong enough to go into the cities being left behind. It was also said that peasants were digging underground pits to hide their food. (Laszlo Ladany, The Communist Party of China and Marxism: 1921-1985)

Insofar as official sources admitted existence of the famine following the Great Leap Forward, it was usually blamed on bad weather - just as the man-made famines of Lenin and Stalin had been. Natural forces did play a small role: perhaps 1 million of the 30 million deaths could be attributed to natural disasters. The deluded zealotry of Mao killed the rest. While even some unsympathetic scholars argue that Mao's famine, unlike Stalin's, does not qualify as murder, the case for Mao's personal guilt is strong. Mao's famine does not seem to have been created for its own sake as Stalin's was. Yet Mao had the experience of both Lenin and Stalin behind him, and knew full-well that collectivization often leads to mass death. He implemented his policies at gunpoint with full knowledge of these risks. Rummel points out that Mao's government tried to alleviate the famine once it was aware of it, but millions had died even before the Great Leap Forward began. In response Mao simply accelerated his pace - revealing the requisite mens rea for murder.

* Executions:

Mao's most famous executions were not his most numerous. In the so-called Cultural Revolution, Mao ordered massive purges of the Chinese Communist Party and of educated professionals. After Mao's fall, purge survivors such as Deng Xioaping seized power and ultimately exposed this crime to the world. About one million Party members and intellectuals were killed during Mao's Cultural Revolution - many by execution, others in the camps. Overall, however, Mao's killing actually declined during the Cultural Revolution. During earlier periods, millions of landlords, better-off peasants, dissidents, former Nationalist civil servants, and other "counter-revolutionaries" were executed. Numerical estimates are difficult to make, but probably add up to about 10-15 million.

http://www.gmu.edu/departments/economics/bcaplan/museum/comfaq.htm#part7

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