NEWSTROLLS EXCLUSIVES Desperate Protest With Life and Blood by LI, Yongming(alias) Declaration of the China Labor Party (Draft)

Dear Washington Post Editor,

Your staff writer, Mr. John Pomfret's significant article on internal security and the growing popular uprisings in today's communist China (Washington Post, January 21, 1999,p19 ) has cast false light on a noble cause of freedom under a collapsing communist regime.

This important report may be better headlined, "The Thorny Road Leading to Freedom and Democracy--Chinese Citizens' Heroic Struggle for Their Fundamental Rights", instead, it was titled " Chinese Crime Rate Soars As Economic Problems Grow". It is sad that that the current growing popular peaceful protests inside the People's Republic of China (PRC) are wrongfully categorized into the growing criminal activities or criminal activities related. Mr. Pomfret's article is misleading the world opinion pool where the Washington Post has long played the leading role in support of freedom and democracy of people through out the world. One should not accept any agitprop pronouncements emanating from the morally collapsed Beijing "Dictatorship of Proletariat" as if those peaceful, rationale anti-communist demonstrations were the work of criminals, thieves and thugs. Thus, the communist leadership does not face a "crime wave" justifying the headline: "Chinese Crime Rate Soars," but rather seeks to repress freedom. Mr. Pomfret's article has echoed Mr. Luo Gan, the Secretary General for the State Council of the PRC, who recently pronounced a new wave of communist mobilized nationwide "crack-down" against "criminals". Tuned in the same rhyme with Mr. Pomfret's, Mr. Luo Gan has given the broad interpretation of the term "criminals" by specifically involving the "elements threatening the state security" (such as recently sentenced co-founders of China Democracy Party) and so-called "subversive forces in color of feudalistic superstitions (a catch- all accusations used to justify the CCP's savage religious persecution in communist political-legal culture.)

The most recent events which may have prompted Mr. Pomfret to call for world's attention to China's "soaring criminal activities" is , as it was actually quoted in his article, a bloody confrontation between 1000 armed police plus 500 fully armed PLA regular troops dispatched by the communist government and 3000-5000 peaceful protests from rural area of Hunan Province. During the intensified clash between peaceful protesters and armed police and troops, one protester was instantly killed, more than a hundred were wounded. Many were arrested. The protest was triggered by a farmers' self- governing rights watch group was illegally banned by the government and the activists were arrested. This farmers' uprising, like many other similar events happening in vast regions of China, has demonstrated relatively higher level political call for reclaiming their long denied civil rights raised by these Chinese people on grassroots level. These heroic and rationale people have long been ignored, derogated and labeled as the number of "ill-educated, ignorant mob who do not deserve such a luxury stuff as of democracy". However, what we have witnessed is that it is them who have not only demonstrated to the world their courage to defend their fundamental rights (In Red China, it usually means the cost of your life), but also they showed to the world their political maturity in fighting for their long lost rights in a rationale, peaceful and orderly manner.

There are blind points when two fundamentally different countries were dragged together to make the comparison. These blind points may be used to exert subtle but undue influence on the general public. In the United States, a leading constitutional democracy, majority people have expressed their desire to have more police forces to fight against common criminals. The reason is simple, in a free land of constitutional democracy, there is no fundamental conflicts or head-on clashes of interests between the government and the governed. Even though there may be serious conflict of interests between the government and the governed, an open society built on a democratic institution provides various means of remedies and reparation.

The Founding Fathers of the United States designed a truly "Revolution Proof" state. None of these are in existence in communist China which constitutionally exercises the Stalinist "Dictatorship of Proletariat" today. To use the American experiences to lead the American readers to believe that what is happening in communist China today is not a peaceful revolution (which is leading to freedom and democracy in China), but a horrifying uprising of criminal activities, it goes even further than the "People's Daily", the "Pravda of Chinese Character".

We have long noticed that the Media has downplayed the widespread popular civil rights uprisings in China these days. When the silence was finally broken, the message deliberately mixed up with the negative focus on China's growing criminal activities. Mr. Pomfret even did not forget reminding the American people that 442 police officers were killed and 7735 were injured in China in 1998. While reporting an on-going peaceful pro-democracy revolution in communist China, Mr. Pomfret quoted Chinese communist dictators propaganda "the on-going fifth peak of criminal activity" in China, legitimizing all sort of crack downs against any pro- democracy movement by communist dictators in Beijing.

Further, "crime" statistics must be suspect when provided by the regime that brought you the Tian An Men Square massacre of students and citizens in 1989, the "Great Leap Forward", "Collectivization of the Land", the "Gang of Four", the "Cultural Revolution", etc. These events result in the death of more than 80 million Chinese citizens since 1949. (Not to mention the more than 50,000 U.S. servicemen killed by the so-called Chinese People's Liberation Army in Korea and Vietnam.)

The world currently is witnessing confrontations between the repressive and illegitimate communist regime and Chinese patriots who are personally risking their "...lives, fortunes, and sacred honor...." in an effort to achieve some measure of personal human dignity and freedom. Hundreds of considerable size of confrontations occurred last month all over the PRC--for a communist, it is a real crisis!

In the past month, in hamlets and small towns all over China, hundreds of similar demonstrations, great and small, took place protesting against the massive corruption and repression of an entrenched and corrupt one-party system that has been in power for more than forty nine years. No doubt, some desperate individuals took advantage of the repressive police actions to this wave of mass protest, but that hardly justifies the participants or their protest as "criminal", in the normal use of the English language. In the Communist Chinese lexicon, however, anyone protesting against the power of the "dictatorship of the proletariat" is a criminal--or worse--an "enemy of the people"! However, the days for such a regime now are really numbered, even though Mr. Pomfret may not be willing to see it.

By John D. Hemenway and Ning Ye, members of Free China Movement

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