I Escaped Chinese Totalitarianism. Now It’s Coming To America

I grew up in what I call post-totalitarian (that is post-Mao) China. 

Mao, the ruthless and cunning tyrant, ruled China for nearly 30 years, from 1949 to 1976, the year of his death. It was a period when China was soaked in blood, famine, and mayhem, as Mao (not Stalin or Hitler) produced the deadliest regime in modern human history — a fact much of the western world is unaware of. But the darker shadow Mao cast upon the Chinese nation is a loss of humanity ensuing from scores of mass movements marked by endless persecutions, denunciations, and false confessions. The loss of spirituality, human dignity, and interpersonal trust is profound and irrevocable. The nation that survived those savage mass movements has learned to be cynical, calculating, and deceptive.

From a very young age, I was puzzled by the pervasive inequality, unapologetic unfairness, and privileges reserved for the Communist Party members that were palpable in every corner of Chinese society. Being the child of illiterate parents who struggled to feed the family through a series of menial jobs, I faced in society and at school blatant prejudice and discrimination. Meanwhile, I was troubled to see the so-called “people’s servants” (i.e., governmental officials) wantonly abuse power to accumulate wealth and dictate the lives of those around them with tyrannical edicts. 

Those experiences served as the earliest evidence that the propaganda I would often read in textbooks or hear in the state-run media was untrue. They left me questioning whether the Communist Party had actually made China free and equal, as they claimed. 

In truth, this Communist Party does not conceive of the Chinese people as beings of intrinsic value, but only objects of utility. For the CCP, the Chinese people are no more than the building blocks of the country’s GDP. And the people, either having learned that the regime is a brutal dictatorship or being thoroughly brainwashed to equate the country with the Party, won’t bother to fight for their rights; they play along. 

The Chinese nation is but a lie. By either quiet and passive compliance or deliberate calculation, everybody is confirming the system. 

Allan Bloom, in The Closing of The American Mind, writes that every educational system has a moral goal in accordance with the nature of the regime and for the purpose of producing the right kind of human beings that best serve the regime. “Aristocracies want gentlemen, oligarchies, men who respect and

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