The Nine Commentaries on the Chinese Communist Party were only beginning to reverberate in Communist China and throughout the world when Zhao Ziyang passed away on January 17. The Communists had ample opportunity to show the world they were beginning to understand the lessons in those commentaries. Instead, they responded with a combination of fearful silence about Zhao and cowardly violence against his mourners. If a picture is worth a thousand words, and silence can “speak volumes,” then the Tenth Commentary on the Chinese Communist Party has already been written, by the CCP itself!

Mere days after news of Zhao’s death reached the outside world, retired cadres, exiled dissidents, desperate appellants, and foreign admirers asked the Party to give Zhao the justice and credit he deserved. Would it have been so hard to do so? Nikita Khrushchev, hardly a democrat in any shape or from- just ask Hungary- lifted the box and allowed some of the truth to escape about Joseph Stalin after the latter’s reign of terror finally died in 1956. Hu Jintao and his allies had every reason to do a similar truth-telling about the spring of 1989. Of the three men most tied to the fate of the massacre, Deng Xiaoping was dead, while Li Peng and Jiang Zemin were in retirement, largely due to the factional maneuverings of Hu and his allies.

It was a perfect opportunity: consign the aging rivals of the current leaders to the bloody history, make peace with one of the last good souls the Chinese Communist Party ever put into high office, and show the people that the Party itself can acknowledge errors that involve victims not named Deng Xiaoping (who himself only achieved power, we now know, because Mao changed his mind about him before dying).

Some of us were immediately skeptical. After all, Hu was the holder of all three power posts- state President, Party General Secretary, and most important, Central Military Commission Chairman- during last November’s Hanyuan County Massacre. Still, even yours truly might have been forced to rearrange his world view had Hu et al stood with Zhao’s family and said, in effect, Zhao was right, and Deng, Li, and Jiang were wrong.

However, once again, Hu Jintao revealed himself to be a true Communist, to whom the Party is everything and the people are nothing. The Party’s craven silence on Zhao- his funeral had no eulogy- confirmed the fundamental truth about the Party, a truth Zhao himself learned when he began his 15-year house detainment: you can be an honest man; you can be a Communist; you can never be both. Meanwhile, the regime’s brutal treatment toward those who came to mourn him- at least 900 are “missing,” several more were under house arrest, and at least one was beaten so badly he practically lost his eye- sent a loud and clear message to the Chinese people, again: step out of line, and we will knock you back in, dead or alive.

Rather than move away from the Hanyuan County Massacre, in which ten thousand were killed according to a one account just for demanding more compensation for losing their homes to a hydroelectric dam, the actions of Hu et al brought the regime closer to it. The Party once again embraced terror over trust, fear over freedom, and curt slander over common sense. Every evil impulse in the Chinese Communist Party was on display. In fact, the Communists meant to put them there, for they know they can only rule by fear and loathing, not friendship and love.

In time, the Chinese people will overcome their fear. With each use of terror, the Party will find the weapon grows weaker as the people have less to lose and more outrage from which to draw strength. In many respects, the Nine Commentaries on the Chinese Communist Party have collected the evidence and presented it in a manner that seemed to be unequaled. However, the Communists managed to match it in their horrible treatment of the late Zhao Ziyang and his would-be mourners. They have revealed how they treat disagreement within the ranks, dissension among the people, and criticism abroad: a cowardly airbrush of history, a lot of jail terms and beatings, and a complete apathy for outside opinion. Thus, the Communists have created an unintended masterpiece in the “Zhao Ziyang fiasco.” They have found an eloquence that only comes from the unwitting fool, the villain with no sense of irony, and all those blinded by their own pettiness.

So I must conclude with congratulations to the Chinese Communist Party. Not only have they written the Tenth Commentary, they have ensured it an equal place with the other Nine. May they be thrown from power before they can write an Eleventh!

---

D.J. McGuire is President and Co-founder of the China e-Lobby and the author of Dragon in the Dark: How and Why Communist China Helps Our Enemies in the War on Terror.