Freedom cry should have world’s ear

AT a protest rally in Beijing this week, a Chinese Communist Party official warned the gathering protesters not to be misguided by “foreign influence.” An angry protester quipped back from the crowd, “by foreign influence do you mean Marx and Engels?”

Last Thursday, a street protester in the hinterland metropolis Chongqing quoted Patrick Henry’s “Give me liberty or give me death!” repeatedly. The police tried to arrest him, only to be repulsed by an angry crowd.

This is the source of both the Chinese regime’s draconian conduct and the protests that erupted this past weekend. Neither is really about COVID. It’s about the battle between communism and freedom.

There has been a remarkable consistency of the CCP’s ideology. Xi’s COVID-zero policies are motivated by the same thinking that drove Mao in the 1950s to believe the omnipotent Chinese Communist Party could eradicate all the rats and sparrows in China.

Mao’s draconian Great Leap Forward led to the deaths of more than 40 million Chinese people. Xi’s draconian COVIDzero policy threatens to do the same. They are motivated by a purely totalitarian ideology which assumes not only the complete malleability of nature, but the utter infallibility and invincibility of the party.

Blinded by this radical utopian vision, the CCP is consistently callous toward its people’s well-being, but this callousness has traditionally impacted more on migrant workers and the rural poor. This time, the party’s all-encompassing COVID-zero lockdowns have affected the property-owning and educated middle class and the rich, and this brings with it unintended consequences.

Millions of Chinese people across the nation, from all sections of the repressed country, are now willing to risk imprisonment, torture and even death to stand up to their oppressors.

And this is singularly significant. This national uprising disproves the prevailing pessimism in the West toward the possibility of substantial grassroots resistance to the CCP. We are now seeing that silence does not necessarily indicate capitulation to repression. The possibility of resistance is ever present, if only the opportunity presents itself.

The Chinese people understand their regime better than anyone. Not only do they see the CCP for what it is, they look outward and see what China could be. The common street music among China’s protesters today was the battle hymn of the Hong Kong protesters three years ago that includes lyrics such as “Do you hear the people sing? Singing the song of angry men . . . it is the music of the people who will not be slaves again!”

Now, more than ever, it is imperative that leaders in the free world openly express their support for the Chinese people. This has been a primary aim of Hudson Institute’s China Center, where former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo recently spoke about the repression of the CCP and the universality of liberty and human rights.

Our current leaders must take up this charge and they must do so with zero ambiguity.