The Jiuping tells the stories of many ordinary Chinese. One of these is a Communist Party intellectual named Zhang Zhixin. After Mao began the Cultural Revolution, Zhang spoke her mind. She was arrested in September 1969 and sentenced to life in prison. In prison, the guards repeatedly stripped her naked, handcuffed her hands behind her back, and threw her in with the male prisoners, where she would be gang raped. Eventually she went insane. On April 3, 1975 she was sentenced to be executed. After she was sentenced the guards held her down and, without anesthesia, cut a hole in her trachea and jammed a small plastic tube into the hole. She could breath but could not speak. The next day, at Dawa, the execution grounds in Liaoning Province, she stood mute when the firing squad gunned her down, her silence a sign to all who were there that she accepted the justice of the Party’s verdict.

Before Zhang was executed Party officials called in her family. They wished to judge the family’s attitude. Her husband warned their two young children in advance- they could not weep in front of the officials, or else they could not renounce their tie to their mother. The Party officials asked the daughter, Lin Lin, would she object to her mother being executed? The father answered for her- the Party should do what it deems necessary. The official pressed on, if she were executed, would they want her effects? Would they want to pick up her body? “They had no need of her body. The government could dispose of her as it wished.”

At home that night the father put the two young children to bed. After he thought they were asleep he got out his wife’s photo, and looking at it silently began to weep. Lin Lin saw him weeping, came and climbed onto his lap and began crying loudly. Her father admonished her, they must not cry out loud or the neighbors would report them. The little boy woke up and came and also climbed on his father’s lap. The three of them sat together through the night weeping silently.

Those of us at Epoch Times understand all too well stories like those of Zhang Zhixin and her family. Our paper started a little over four years ago. A number of our editors and reporters were in mainland China. One night in December 2000 e-mails were suddenly no longer answered. Our colleagues had all been swept up by the police. One of those arrested is someone also named Zhang, a reporter, editor and website designer named Zhang Yuhui. He and six others who had worked to build our website were sentenced to long prison terms in Sihui Prison. They have suffered horrific abuse there. Yuhui was tortured every day without let-up for seven days in November 2003. Three of those days he was hung from a cross. After that his young son was shown a picture of him. The son turned away, shouting “That is not my father.” Yuhui had aged so much from the torture that he was no longer recognizable.

So the Communist Party has not changed. In 1975 it tortured and executed Zhang Zhixin for speaking her mind. In 2005 it continues to torture Zhang Yuhui because he dared to report honestly about the Communist regime.

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The Jiuping explains that the Communist Party has always had a 5% rule. At any time, it selects 5% of the population for persecution. The other 95% see those 5% being persecuted. The 95% will do anything to escape the Party’s terror, and willingly accept whatever the Party says so long as they can avoid joining the 5%. The Party thus gains power over the hearts and minds of everyone in China.

By July 1999, the number of people practicing Falun Gong had grown to be about 5-6% of China’s population and Jiang Zemin ordered that Falun Gong should be persecuted. Since then, the persecution of house Christians, Catholics and other religious and spiritual groups has greatly intensified. Why at this moment has the Party chosen to try to stamp out all forms of spiritual belief in China? Such belief provides a standpoint independent of the Communist Party by which to judge the Party. Belief provides principles, principles to which some believers will hold to even in the face of the Party’s terror.

One of the subtleties of the Party’s tyranny today is the way in which it does allow the appearance of criticism. In fact, those in China who criticize the Party do so on the basis of the understanding the Party has given them. The Jiuping tells how during the Tiananmen Square massacre at first some students hid in the bushes. Then they decided to go out and meet the soldiers who were hunting them down. They got up and walked toward the soldiers singing the “Internationale,” the Communisty Party anthem. Why did they sing the “Internationale”? It was the only song they knew.

From time to time I talk with graduate students from mainland China studying at my University. They are quite ready to criticize the Communist Party. But suggest to them that the Party should move towards democracy and the protection of human rights, and they will earnestly explain that they– these extremely intelligent, disciplined and hard working young people - are not capable of democracy. Stability is the most important thing for China. Only the Party can give China the stability it needs and prevent China from being humiliated in the world once again. Every word they use to criticize the Party is on the basis of what the Party has taught them to think.

The Jiuping was written with students like these in mind. They don’t know of the Party’s continuous history of massive crimes. They don’t understand how the Party has perfected the use of terror and propaganda to control the people of China. They don’t understand how every single thing they hear from the state-sanctioned media is lies. These students criticize the pervasive corruption, the exploitation of the peasants and the workers, the environmental degradation, and the collapse of morality in China. They see these phenomena as instances of the Party needing reform. They can’t understand that these phenomena are not aberrations; they are not errors; they are the natural consequence of what the Party is.

The Jiuping gives to these students and to the people of China the true history of the Chinese Communist Party, and in doing so give them an independent basis from which to judge the Party. The Jiuping explains the origin and nature of the Communist Party; reveals its record of terror and criminality; and shows how the Party controls the people of China.

But the Jiuping does something more. It explains how the Party has set itself against what has been the basis of civilization in all times and all places. In every case, one finds civilization grows out of religion and traditional beliefs about morality that are based on religion. China’s civilization finds its basis in Buddhism, Confucianism, and Daosim. The Party from the beginning had to attack and try to destroy these beliefs. In doing so, it took from the Chinese people the basis of their culture, and took from them the possibility of a shared moral understanding that could bind together and regulate society. The Jiuping shows this attack on belief and morality was not an error made by particular Party leaders. It was the expression of the Party’s innermost being, an opposition to the very nature of things.

Precisely because the Party sets itself against our nature, the Party is doomed to end. The multiple crises the Party has brought down on Chinese society are the sign of this imminent collapse.
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The entire world seems to be looking to China today. Last year American business invested $60 billion dollars in China. Each day our links to China grow. The future of China is now tied to all our futures. But these close ties are built like castles in the air, they are built on illusions we have about the Party that rules China.

One knows what a thing is by what it has been. But here in the U.S. we are largely ignorant of the great leap forward and the Cultural Revolution. We don’t know and don’t understand the massive suffering of the Chinese people. In the wretched history of the 20th century, perhaps no people has suffered more. The Black Book of Communism estimates 65 million unnatural deaths in China during the Communist Party’s rule. We believe this figure to be low; the Jiuping estimates at least 80 million have died. But such statistics are too big to comprehend. One can’t see the horror of what the Chinese Communist Party has brought to this earth by reading such numbers. And one can’t understand the fundamental continuity that lies underneath the surface of all the Party does.

So the west badly needs to read the Jiuping. We need to base our relations with China on a true understanding of the history of China and of the Chinese Communist Party. If we do so, we will divest ourselves of the illusions and false hopes the Party has given us. Instead, we will act with compassion for the Chinese people as they come to terms with the horrors that have been inflicted on them.

The Chinese people are now, under the influence of the Jiuping , beginning to have free and honest conversations that had never before been possible. In Chinese language forums on the Jiuping held in cities around the world, Chinese of all walks of life are coming together. The tyranny that has kept them silent and separated is put aside. People speak from the heart about the losses they have suffered, and the ways the Party has betrayed them.

The Jiuping has given to the children of Zhang Zhixin the chance to weep openly about their mother’s murder; they do not need to stand mute in the face of tyranny. They now can speak out loud their question, why should such things ever be endured?

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This is a transcription of a speech given at a forum on the Nine Commentaries on the Communist Party held at the New York City Press Club on January 25, 2005. Stephen Gregory is the Opinion Editor of The Epoch Times.