A major Grenadian dilemma centres around the fact that this nation’s stagnancy leaves us with two options for a way forward – either we develop ourselves through local initiatives, incentives, programmes/projects, or we place all those things in the hands of foreign nations at a cost that they determine.
Our leaders have chosen the latter for the majority of our 50 years of ‘independence.’ We have surrendered our development, indeed, the majority of our infrastructure (airport, bridges, stadium, tennis court, community centres etc.) to foreign nations over the years, so that, slowly, all pretenses of that independence have been eroded to near nonexistence.
These such nations have mainly been China and Russia/Cuba, communist states, largely enigmas to us. In 1979, when Russia, through Cuba, its proxy, became the dominant element of our so-called development, Grenadians had unwittingly traded one empire for another – Great Britain for the Soviet Union.
After the downfall of the Revolution, and the subsequent collapse of the Soviet Union on Christmas Day, 1991, Grenadians learned that the days of dependence had not yet ended. Because in a few years, when our nation became a drowning man clutching at straw, our government would give us up to Russia’s offspring – Communist China.
China – a nation that is largely a mystery to us; that operates here behind a veil through which we cannot see. Whose deeds or ethics we don’t quite question, and which seems to be getting more and more omnipresent, more ingrained in the fabric of our Government.
Who are they? Where did they come from – what exactly is ‘China’? And what about Russia, their progenitor? What made these two communist powers, and what has their interference meant for us as Grenadians? These questions will be explored in two parts, this week’s publication being the first.
Tiananmen Square Massacre
In 1989, just six years after our own local crisis which resulted in the end of Grenada’s Communist Government, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Government quashed the largest outcry for democracy since the beginning of the CCP’s rule in 1949.
Many of us may remember the daily spectacle of student protestors and those who joined them on Tiananmen Square in Beijing, China, which lasted for seven weeks. And though the Chinese Government has done all possible so that the world forgets (or doesn’t know the truth at all), some of us may recall the massacre that followed.
Unarmed students were ambushed on the square on the night of June 3rd, some of them asleep. The Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) shot and butchered their way into the area, killing the human obstructions that wilfully barred their armoured vehicles’ advancement towards the protestors from about two miles away from Tiananmen.
On several occasions, after having been peacefully denied entry by the protestors into the square, though they were armed, the PLA had retreated; had even sung songs of their Communist Revolution with the protestors. This time, the PLA did not retreat.
The nations of the world watched in horror as reports of tanks intentionally running over civilians, soldiers gunning them down, and acts of bestial brutality became news to the wider world on June 4th. Several days of conflict between the people and the PLA followed.
The Chinese learned that mass arrests and summary executions were the price they had to pay for their heartful defiance and desire for what they saw as freedom; the American way that they had glimpsed during China’s few years of reform and opening up.
Though the government of Deng Xiaoping implemented piecemeal reforms of their communist system using capitalist principles hinted at party-led reform, the illusion that China’s leaders were willing to maintain stability without overt and forceful repression was hopelessly shattered. The number of total deaths is unknown.
The details of what drove the Chinese people to such an exceptionally unusual display of opposition to their government which routinely oppressed the nation they promised to serve are as fascinating as they are foreign, yet familiar to us.
The communist system, headed by Mao Zedong, had promised to be the antidote to China’s chaotic, poor, oppressive, and hopeless state under both its imperial system and its nationalist period (which was led by Chiang Kai-Shek, the man who would later form Taiwan, the Republic of China, on an island the West called Formosa) and gave the empty promises always sworn by communists.
Free press, free speech, land to the landless, bountiful food supply, democracy, and as always: deliverance from the tyranny of the present, and a perfect nation without any faults or insufficiencies were assured, once the nation converted to Communism.
And the sorrowful, depressed, needy Chinese grabbed on with both hands, only to replace one emperor, their ‘Son of Heaven’ as he was called, with a god by the name of Mao Zedong, who was apt to kill his own people by tens of millions by either intentional famines, labour camps (laogai), torture or murder.
Even Mao’s death in 1976 with Parkinson’s disease hadn’t resolved China’s cycle of tyranny, and in an outburst led by students, the Chinese marched on Tiananmen Square, and begged, pleaded, and demanded change – the protestors peaking at over a million on occasions.
But the CCP didn’t want freedom, for to let the people be free meant to give up the total control they had enjoyed for 40 years at the time – and they would not surrender that control for something that would not benefit them.
After several stalemates and vain discussions done in bad faith, the Chinese Government reverted to the old Chinese way: violent suppression. And from the moment of their attack on their own people begging for change, the Chinese Government began to spin the web of lies: no one died in Tiananmen. Only a few ruffians who attacked the army outside the square were killed – and justly so.
That the army was the true victim who heroically resisted an attack of counterrevolutionaries; and those soldiers who died are martyrs whose blood has sanctified the Revolution, and by whose sacrifice Tiananmen has been returned to the people. The fallen soldiers and their families were the only ones commemorated in state ceremonies.
The Tiananmen Massacre is known simply as the June 4th Incident in China, and the CCP is still trying to force the world to forget it. We shall not forget, nor be a victim of a repeat.
Tibet
Neither shall we forget their invasion and annexation of Tibet, a nation whose domination by China has been interestingly scrubbed from history. Tibet, a huge, isolated nation on the mountains of the Himalayas, had existed for 2000 years as an independent state, but had a brief period under the suzerainty (the right of a country to partly control another) of China from 1906-1911.
Between 1911-1949, Tibet had exercised complete independence for nearly 40 years. In 1949, the same year Mao Zedong had declared the newly established People’s Republic of China, the Chinese began to flood their westerly neighbour Tibet with Chinese settlers and built roads leading to the Tibetan border.
By 1950 it seemed the Tibetans would lose autonomy and become a minority in their own country, and on January 1st, 1950, China declared sovereignty over Tibet, which Tibetans did not accept.
In 1951, the hypocrisy of China was of epic proportions as they discussed Tibetan autonomy with the Dalai Lama in Beijing (then called Peking) negotiations while they were busy breaking it in Lhasa, the capital, where Chinese occupation was mounting.
The Tibetans, marginalised in their own country, saw the death of hundreds through torture, executions, suicide and starvation; along with dispossession of Tibetan lands and animals; the Chinese occupiers emptied Buddhist monasteries; and established laogais, where they made Tibetans slaves in their own land to Chinese businesses.
They subjected nuns and monks to political re-education, and still do (2023 Annual Report of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom). The spiritual and political leader of Tibet, the 14th Dalai Lama, now 88 years old, was forced to run away in 1959 after a perceived conspiracy for either his disappearance or murder by the Chinese.
He was invited to a cultural performance and told to attend without bodyguards. Sensing his precarious situation, he fled with some of his faithfuls to India where he founded the Tibetan government-in-exile. China made concerted efforts to destroy Tibetan culture and language, and renamed them ‘Xizang’ in official documents (according to Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi) and state news agencies, a move completely politically driven to legitimise the occupation and administration of Tibet, say experts.
There have been notable violent unrests in 1959, 1980, and 2008 against China’s brutal occupation, and despite constant surveillance and oppression, Tibetans have never accepted the Chinese identity forced upon them.
1927-1949 Chinese Civil War
After the fall of China’s Imperial system at the turn of the 20th century, many forces tried to fill the void it left; Chinese warlords, military officers, socialists, and puppets of the Japanese.
The 1911 Revolution of socialist Sun Yat-Sen filled the space left by the death of the last mature member of the monarchy. His party, the Kuomintang, or Nationalists, would produce both Chiang Kai Shek and Mao Zedong, they would dominate Chinese politics till their deaths.
Though both Marxists, due to internal differences, the two men, one communist (Mao Zedong) and one socialist (Chiang Kai Shek) would become mortal enemies (much like Grenada’s Coard and Bishop), and in the conflict they waged against one another, over 2 million Chinese lost their lives.
The Communists called it Revolution, by definition a civil war fought for control over China. The Communist strongholds under Mao’s CCP called themselves the People’s Republic of China (PRC), while Chiang Kai Shek’s Kuomintang, the only recognised government of China, headed the Republic of China (ROC).
The CCP succeeded in deposing the Kuomintang in 1949, despite the fact that these Nationalists were bolstered by American aid and arms. Chiang Kai Shek and the members of the Kuomintang and their supporters fled to the nearby island of Formosa, or ‘Taiwan’ in Chinese, and established there a stronghold of his party’s government, the Republic of China.
Mao Zedong renamed the mainland nation ‘The People’s Republic of China,’ and swore to ‘liberate’ Taiwan from the Kuomintang. Chiang Kai Shek, the recognised leader of China’s government-in-exile, swore to bolster his army to take back mainland China from the Communists.
Neither side fulfilled their promises, and both Chiang Kai Shek and Mao Zedong are dead, leaving two Chinas: one on the mainland, and one on an island.
The Chinese Communist Party has never owned nor conquered Taiwan, formerly Formosa. The CCP’s Liberation Army never crossed the Formosa Strait between the two nations. Since 1927, there has never been ‘One China’, and certainly not during the 75-year rule of the Communist Party.
It was the Kuomintang that was the founding member (‘China’) of the UN; that signed the Instruments of Surrender which formalised Japan’s defeat in World War 2; and it was the Kuomintang that represented China to the UN and sat as a permanent member of the Security Council there from 1945 until they were ejected in 1971 and replaced by the PRC.
The Communist Party of China being recognised as the legitimate government of that country by relevant nations is an incredibly recent event. It had even taken over 21 propositions between 1949-1971 before the CCP was even admitted to the UN.
To put it succinctly, “Taiwan has not been a part of China,” as said by U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. Before the Nationalists united much of China (besides Manchuria, which was run by Japan and Russia), between 1904 and 1919, a dozen regional overlords subdivided morselled out provinces to lesser feudal warlords by the score, ruling by killing, and some continued to rule to 1930.
Before that, China had been a collage of independent states for centuries. As it is said “the (Chinese) empire, long divided, must unite; long united, must divide. Thus it has ever been (Romance of the Three Kingdoms).” The ‘One China Principle’ to which the Government of Grenada reaffirms its commitment is a farce.
At the heart of China’s policies is the Marxist doctrine of Communism, and the Chinese government has lived out that doctrine by promoting chaos and revolutions abroad, while ruling with an iron fist at home. In the chaos they have created around the world the nationals of Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, the Koreas, and many other nations have been caught in the crosshairs.
Their aim is not international development, but the international domination of Communism. China, once America’s greatest ally in Asia (and whom they defended against Japanese invasion) has morphed into its greatest enemy worldwide.
Their aims are to squelch revolt at home by removing the hope for a better life represented in large part by the USA to Chinese people. It aims to dominate the nations of the world; to redefine world history and misrepresent the present as they’ve been doing since the 70s – for their benefit; and to promote world communism.
Grenada is merely a means to an end for the CCP Government. The fruits of Communism are chaos and poverty. How can these nations so lacking in humanity, want freedom, development, and peace for us when they will not even grant them to their own people?
The Soviet Union’s (Russia’s) governing system was China’s model. It was Russia’s Mikhail Borodin that pushed for the inclusion and promotion of the hard Communist Party that Mao Zedong would come to lead, paving the way for the current Chinese Government; it was Soviet architects that established the Laogai after the Russian gulag system.
This system is a network of slave labour camps where detainees in squalid conditions are forced to produce the merchandise that often finds its way into the markets of the free world, including Grenada. Just read the product origins on labels at our hardware shops, supermarkets, etc.
Russia’s Imperial system was headed by a czar, the last of which was deposed by Revolution in February 1917, during World War I. In October of that year, Vladimir Lenin (of whom Joseph Stalin was a follower) hijacked that revolution with his own Bolshevik coup and put himself and his comrades in power (again, much like Bishop and Coard).
The Russian people had believed they were finally free after centuries of oppression; but the following years of tyranny before Lenin’s death in 1924 stole away their hope. Famine ravaged the land as the Government bore down hard on the agricultural industry, killing or imprisoning farmers, taking their land, and imposing arbitrary controls. Communism hates agriculture.
According to accounts from several sources compiled by A. Markoff in 1933, in 1920-21 alone, 5 million people died of starvation (Russian Government Statistics). In 1933, after Stalin had schemed his way to power, Russia was again in the grips of great famine; cannibalism became a fact of life in localities; cutlets and sausages made from human flesh were found at markets. Cats and dogs became scarce as they were eaten. Between 1931 and 1934, about another 5 million were dead according to Government statistics. At both dreadful periods, Russia’s continued existence was accredited to guess who? vital US aid that came when the truth escaped from Russia’s borders.
It was America’s recognition of the Soviet Union in 1933, after 16 years of non-recognition that opened the door to trade and gave legitimacy to Russia’s Revolutionary Government. Even Russia’s victory against the invading German Nazis in World War 2 was due in large part to 11 billion dollars of American arms and materiel, in addition to food. Russia is not all it is cracked up to be.
So, who are we? And can these nations truly help us? Are we more deserving and loved by foreign political leaders who hate and slaughter their own and others?
Zarah Chase