China’s rulers don’t represent its people

THE RULERS of China insist on bilateral talks with the Philippines to foist China’s “indisputable sovereignty” over “lost territories.” Ok, let’s talk, but we insist on talking with freely chosen leaders who truly represent the Chinese people, not the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)-supplied rulers who subjugate China. Bilateral talks would be far more sensible and legitimate if we could negotiate with real patriots who actually care for all of China like maybe Liu Xiaobo, Chen Guangcheng, Ai WeiWei or any caring citizen not jailed or dead for expressing sensibility. We prefer to negotiate with leaders or sages, not tyrants.

You see, leaders are freely chosen and willingly followed by a free people. In China, leaders, representing the people’s will, are either killed or detained, or sent into exile or subjected to grave threats by officials of the ruling CCP. These despots allow no one but party members to rule China. The CCP does not see the people as its source of legitimacy and power. It sees the people as property to exploit along with the environment.

The CCP’s obsession for economic/monetary wealth above all else has elbowed aside the welfare of the masses. Decades of corrupt and reckless exploitation have critically exhausted China’s people and environment as evidenced by extreme pollution, “cancer villages,” soaring mutant birth rate, suicide net, etc. The Chinese masses, now more than ever, furiously blame authoritarian negligence, callousness, greed and corruption for China’s expansive environmental collapse and other tragedies. “China’s stability-obsessed communist rulers often try to contain anger… fearing that it could spiral into dissent” (from an Agence France-Presse report). When anger defies containment, the CCP cowardly improvises to divert public rage toward other nations, friendly neighbors even, by aggravating, or even creating, situations (e.g., mishaps, territorial conflicts, etc.) to inflame nationalist sentiments.

A curious case of such diversion was the disappearance of MH370. At the time, the CCP seemed more focused on (and determined in) condemning friendly Malaysia than on the search and rescue efforts. The CCP’s misleading satellite images and questionable search techniques even undermined the search for MH370.

The CCP’s territorial expansion is alarmingly in step with the characteristic strategic movements of a superpower going rogue and positioning itself to seize more resources and territory from weaker neighbors. Adverse developments in China increasingly reveal that the aggressive expansion into neighboring territories is primarily driven by the collapsing environment of the mainland; this will inevitably cripple its economy and force the people, especially the heavily yoked masses in unbearably polluted places, to revolt for survival. But instead of focusing on restoring China’s environment and the people’s wellbeing, the CCP has without remorse concentrated on accelerated military buildup and territorial expansion as the comprehensive solution to China’s widening realms of untenable toxic wastelands. The tyrants’ solution is a serious problem to free nations.

Filipinos are seen as poor, weak and servile. Yet, we never needed “suicide nets” around our workplaces. I for one am a long toiling, lowly paid worker swimming in debt, and yet I delight in this priceless freedom of choosing to be a “dangerous thinker” who openly castigates oppressors like the CCP, which over a billion people in subjugated China cannot freely do. I may never meet the true advocates, patriots and struggling people of China, but I follow, read, listen to and admire them.

In contrast, the CCP has no admiration or sympathy for its so called “digits” (people). It has long regarded the people of China as the biggest threat to its rule compared to any foreign power it challenges. Ask those who had lived through “The Great Leap Forward,” “The Cultural Revolution,” “The Tiananmen Dissenticide” or any party purge, cleansing or “reform campaign.” How many did these movements kill?

You may yet find the rage in knowing that the CCP has killed far more sons and daughters of China than all past foreign aggressors in all world wars combined. The traitorous, plundering, “sinocidal” CCP is the greatest enemy of China. To verify this, ask those ruled by the CCP today: When the People’s Liberation Army appears at your square, do you feel liberated? Or subjugated?

My fear is that the CCP is engineering an “on-call” war with a preferably weak neighbor to preempt a brewing Chinese revolt. Because war with a foreign bogeyman would naturally rally and unite even the subversive Chinese masses back to their own oppressive government. Simplistically, if China verges on revolt, the CCP will shoot at us. There is cold logic in that stratagem.

I’ll never fight the people of China but I’ll fight its tyrants. And if China must revolt to survive, it should do so knowing that its neighbors are not the enemy the CCP wants the Chinese people to believe we are. We struggle with China as allies. Freedom-loving and freedom-longing people must come together to fight tyranny not with guns and bombs (which just tend to raise other tyrants) but with freedom itself—freedom to information, to choose, think, speak, rebuke, organize and stand one’s righteous ground. Freedom ultimately defeats tyranny.

The free world must never refer to the CCP as China because China stands for its sovereign people, not their ruling tormentors. Never castigate China for the sins of the CCP. In the principal battleground of consciousness, we must separate the sovereign people of China from the rogue CCP.

Ernie Lapuz is a company driver who loves to read.