Fat Years - Chan Koonchung [131]
three Party Congresses: A Communist Party congress is held every five years. The next congress is due in 2012. At these congresses, the new top level of leadership (the Politburo, Politburo Standing Committee [nine members who are the heart of Chinese rule], president and premier) is presented to the nation, having been chosen in secret by the outgoing leadership in fierce factional infighting.
Party Secretariat: The Secretariat of the Communist Party of China Central Committee is the CCP’s permanent bureaucracy. There are several secretaries and they manage the work of the Politburo and its Standing Committee.
feichengwuraook: A genuine URL, but actually a phishing site designed to harm your computer.
monsters and demons: A phrase made popular by Mao Zedong to attack specialists, scholars, and other so-called class enemies during the Cultural Revolution. On June 1, 1966, the People’s Daily published an editorial entitled “Sweep Away All Monsters and Demons.” Soon after, the Red Guards went on the rampage for victims.
1983 crackdown: During the Anti-Spiritual Pollution Campaign in late 1983 to early 1984, some factions of the Chinese Communist Party tried to stamp out the influence of Western liberal ideas and cultural practices coming into China due to the “Reforms and Openness” policies that began in 1979. It was a short-lived and largely ineffective campaign, but it did involve many public executions, often of young people, in Shanghai and other cities.
the trial of the Gang of Four: The name given to a powerful radical leftist faction of the Chinese Communist Party during the Cultural Revolution. They included Jiang Qing, Mao Zedong’s wife, and Zhang Chunqiao, Yao Wenyuan, and Wang Hongwen. They were imprisoned shortly after Mao’s death in 1976 and given a show trial in 1981 that resulted in prison sentences ranging from twenty years to life, and a death sentence for Jiang Qing that was commuted to life. Jiang Qing was famously defiant at the trial, claiming with considerable correctness that she was only carrying out Chairman Mao’s orders. She committed suicide in 1991. For details, see Roderick MacFarquhar and Michael Schoenhals, Mao’s Last Revolution, Harvard Belknap Press, 2006.
Rightist status: Under Mao Zedong’s rule in China, Communist Party members who disagreed with Mao’s policies were frequently branded as Rightists. Some seven hundred thousand or more people were so labeled during the Anti-Rightist Campaign in the late 1950s because they disagreed with the collectivization movement later known as the Great Leap Forward that led to Mao’s great famine. Deng Xiaoping played a prominent role in carrying out this persecution. In the 1980s, these people began to be rehabilitated, many of them posthumously.
Public Security Bureau: The PSB is the main arm of the Chinese police; they operate under the Ministry of Public Security. China also has a very powerful People’s Armed Police Force, a uniformed paramilitary group that is in charge of internal security, crowd control, crackdowns, etc. Many ad hoc groups of mercenaries, sometimes referred to as thugs, also perform similar duties in local areas.
Reforms and Openness: The current reform era in China began in 1979 under the leadership of Deng Xiaoping. Known in China as “Reforms and Openness,” it refers to the policy of reforming China’s economy into a putatively market economy, so-called “market socialism” or “capitalism with Chinese characteristics,” and opening up to the world to allow an influx of foreign investment and cultural influences.
I present the strict facts and employ reasoned arguments, and I argue exclusively