A Conversation with a Chinese Person 07 | The Party Runs Everything. Why Is Every Bad Thing Blamed on Some Other System?

"They have cursed capitalism, the old lords, and slavery all the way through. Chinese people are still swearing loyalty to the Communist Party."

Author / interviewer: Brennan Ruskell

Interviewee: Liu, 65, moved to the United States after retiring

Brennan Ruskell: Why do you think some people don't even know what they are cursing?

Liu: Because what they learned as kids was not how these setups run. It was which word you clap for, and which word you curse in the street. The good things are called socialism being better. The bad things are called capitalism squeezing people. An official bullying people is called leftover feudal stuff, the old lords' junk still hanging around. A worker worked to death is called a slave society. And then Chinese people are all cowards. They don't dare curse the Communist Party. They only dare point at one thing and curse another. They pretend they still worship the Party and worship communism. The only problem, they say, is that bad people slipped into the Party's world and brought in the dregs they learned as kids, the feudal stuff, the capitalist stuff, the slavery stuff. Tell me that isn't sick. They don't just know. They know it very clearly. They are cowards, plus rotten.

Brennan Ruskell: But some people say the problems came because the Party left real communism behind.

Liu: I already told you. Isn't that bullshit? You think I don't understand their slogans? The Soviet Union broke up because of the Soviet revisionists, the ones they say betrayed the real thing, and communism itself had no problem. Every problem like this gets the same answer. Communism is always correct. The Chinese Communist Party is always correct.

Brennan Ruskell: You were a Party member for decades. Do you think they actually understand what they believe?

Liu: Except for a small number who really studied communism, and who had the guts to face themselves and face what society actually is. I dare say, from the start, when the Chinese Communist Party was set up as a spy outfit by the Communist International, Moscow's office for building communist parties in other countries, on the East Asian mainland, right up to now, almost nobody in it understood communism. What some of them could get was the skin of Lenin's system, the way the machine runs. The rest, nothing.

They move by the habit of the big ship already sailing. The system carries them.

Brennan Ruskell: So you're saying it is stuck inside its own setup?

Liu: Yes. Because the base of the system cannot be changed, so this is what they are. Look back. Do you really think reform and opening was reform? Wasn't it just them easing off, after the communist movement failed? And that phrase, hide your strength and wait for the right time, what does it mean? Put Deng Xiaoping in Xi Jinping's time. Could Deng still do reform and opening now? It is not what you Western people understand at all.

Brennan Ruskell: Why do you still press on how it was set up back then?

Liu: Because if you want to understand why communist China became what it is now, the so-called Chinese Communist Party itself is a spy outfit the Soviet Union built after it recruited people on the East Asian mainland. It is like what you in the Western world call a big company opening a branch office on another patch of ground. It does not need to understand that much of the story around it. So it never really understood communism. Do you think Mao Zedong understood communism? Impossible. Chinese people could not understand it either.

Brennan Ruskell: Then why do you hate it when people dump all of today's problems on feudalism?

Liu: I don't have this "I hate it" or "I don't hate it." When I call Chinese people cheap shits and dumb fucks, that is a fairly correct picture of them. Don't take it like this: "they really are cheap shits and dumb fucks, so if I say it straight, I'm just cursing." That way of taking it is wrong. Think. What is feudalism? A feudal lord had to answer for how his own land was doing. A feudal lord did not have this want: suck his own land dry, then, in the name of liberating the world, go suck blood on another piece of land. That is different from communism.

Brennan Ruskell: You even say that sometimes a slave owner would count one step further than the person just carrying out the task?

Liu: A slave owner spent money to buy a person. Some of them would count what they lost if the person got sick, what they lost if the person died, whether the child could be raised. Jefferson left a letter. Five slave children died in one year. He blamed the overseer for only caring about making the mothers work. On his books, raising the child was worth more than a bit of extra work right now, so the mothers needed more rest and less labor. Of course that treats people as property. It is an old way of thinking. But then look at how communism arranges things. The credit goes to the boss. The ruined body is yours. The child you cannot raise is your family's. Who takes the loss for using you up? I am not saying slave owners all had a long view. I am just saying it straight. On some points, communism really is worse than the slave system of a few hundred years ago. Look at China's birth rate now and you know. And I got out of China. I dare say China's birth rate, and the numbers of babies born, have been prettied up a lot. The real numbers are bleaker.

Brennan Ruskell: You think the difference is who takes the loss?

Liu: The Soviet labor camps, the places they locked people up and worked them, already showed you this result. The prisoner did less work, so the food got smaller. He ate less, so he could work even less. In the end the person got weaker and weaker, and the manager still thought he had no value as labor. An organization talks every day about building the future. When it actually runs, it can use up the person in front of it, step by step, until he is dead. Because the people below have to hand in the output, and the people above want to see results. A person's whole life is not inside the task they have to finish. Of course it needs people to work. But needing labor, and being willing to let each worker actually live, are not the same thing at all. The Party, you know. A person is a tool, not the point. A decent way of thinking: the person is the point, not the tool.

Brennan Ruskell: Then why does capitalism always end up taking the blame too?

Liu: Because cursing capital is the easiest. You don't have to answer why workers can't organize on their own. You don't have to answer who stands behind the boss and holds him up. Just say capital chases profit, and it sounds like the thing is explained. But a market at least has to ask: can you compete, can you find another customer, can you say no to the deal. You can't have the leader decide who gets in, who gets kicked out, who can borrow money, whose writing gets deleted, and then say it was all because the market was too free. And so on, and so on. Empty talk.

Said ugly: Chinese people are cowards. Cursing capitalism is just a way to show loyalty to the Chinese Communist Party.

Brennan Ruskell: What you can't understand most is that they don't know these differences?

Liu: Do they really not know the differences at all? I don't believe it. I know Chinese people too well. The people I'm talking about are cowards. They dare curse capital, curse foreigners, curse feudal lords from hundreds of years ago. They just don't dare press the Communist Party that holds power today. Cursing those earlier things costs you nothing. Pressing the Party might hit your own rice bowl, the job that feeds you. If you're scared, you can stay quiet. But they still gang up on the people who say the thing out loud. They treat shutting someone else up as their own love of the country. They call the truth they don't dare face the enemy's lie. In the end, they are just scared to death that the Party will not want them anymore.