By Sherry Lee (李雪莉) and Hsiung Pu (熊樸)

Translated by Yi-En Tzeng

Edited by Matthew Mucha

This piece first appeared in The Reporter and is translated and published with the permission of the publisher.

“The Communist Party upholds a theory, which is never let go ‘the barrel of the gun’ neither ‘the shaft of the pen.’ ‘The barrel of the gun’ refers to military and violence. But this is not enough, ‘the shaft of the pen’ is also needed, which means ‘scammer’ as it refers to a particular ideology. Originated in the Western world, Christianity, at least the so-called Protestant in the United States, is with piles of principles. However, the Communist Party has neither belief, nor rules.”

In China, people who were born in 1949 like Su Xiaokang, are called “peers of the Republic”. However, in his 72-year journey in life, he has been an exile who is not even tolerated by his motherland. There have been extreme ups and downs in his life, with dramatic pains to overcome. 

Born in 1949, Su Xiaokang became a journalist at the “Henan Daily” before he reached 20-years-old. By the end of 1970, when conducting an interview, he learned that millions had starved to death during the “Great Leap Forward” in 1959 at Xinyang, Henan. He conducted research and his reportage of the event was published in Utopian Sacrifice《烏托邦祭》, which was later much praised by writer Bakin (巴金). During those years, Su Xiaokang had authored countless reports which revealed the reality of the underprivileged of China society. Through his own investigations and the shaking of his pen, every single report he produced had caused a stir. 

Being a high-spirited and energetic youth who was motivated to “enlighten” the readers as well as to call for modernization of China, Su Xiaokang took up the position of chief writer of documentary River Elegy (河殤) in 1988. In this documentary, he criticized China's inward-looking “Yellow Civilization”, which was based on Yellow River and the earth, stating that it had resulted in conservativeness, fatuousness and underdevelopment. He claimed that China has to embrace the “Blue Civilization” which was rooted in market economy and democracy. This documentary was broadcasted on China Central Television that year, and its impact was strong. In Taiwan, the manuscript of River Elegy was edited into a book, and in less than half a year, 30 editions were printed. 

However, the writer, who expressed the deepest sighs of the Chinese people, later took part in the “Open Letter to Deng Xiaoping”《致鄧小平的公開信》and requested amnesty for political prisoners. In the following 1989 Tiananmen Square Event, he delivered talks to students at the square and eventually was accused of “the driving force of the student movement behind the scene” by the Chinese Communist Party and blacklisted. After hiding for 100 days, Su Xiaokang was rescued in Operation Siskin and went to Hong Kong. After that, he went on to ParisFrance, and then Princeton in the United States. His long life of exile had begun. 

To the generation of “June 4th 1989” Chinese pro-democracy activists, exile means sadness and loneliness. However, there are flowers and applause in exile. He has described himself as “the most comfortable exile” to his friend Xiaobo Liu (劉曉波). In 1992, Su Xiaokang reunited with his wife and child in the United States. However, the family was involved in a severe car accident the next summer. At one point, it was thought that his wife, Li Fu (傅莉) would become a vegetable. Though her life was saved eventually, she has been confined to a wheelchair. He has been experiencing severe depression since then. He once wanted to end his life on the highway. The dramatic change in life motivated him to move to Delaware, away from the hustle and bustle, with his wife and child, living a solitary life for 15 years. 

Accompanying his wife, Li Fu, in recovering from brain injury for all day, Su Xiaokang picked up his pen and pieces of paper and restarted writing. He later on published A Memoir of Misfortune《離魂歷劫自序》(1997) and The Loneliness of Delaware Bay《寂寞的德拉瓦灣》(2013). These two books were not the same as the grand narrative style of writing from his youth, but rather very personal in the pursuit of life. It was through the journey of writing that he came to understand what ancient people said “the splash of tears”. “Truly, the lens is blurred and splattered by drops of tears.”

After 32 years of being away from his home country and not being able to see his parents again, his son, Su Shan, went back to China to see his father on his behalf; and that meeting, which was also the last, was when the grandfather said to his grandson, "You must love your parents and be truly like the descendants of an exile.”

The father's words to his son were a message of hope for Su Xiaokang as an exile, and an understanding of the fate of exiles.  “At the very end, I didn’t see my father, something I believe my father also regretted. He finally had a chance to express his feelings, contradictory and difficult, through his grandson, and I believe that the meaning of those words encompassed his feelings of helplessness. The first thing that he said was that he respected my choice as an exile, and that it was my choice, and that he did not object to it; I believe that a large number of communists could not say that they objected to the fact that their son had become a dissident, but they did have a lot of apprehensions.”

Twenty years after Su Xiaokang's return from the catastrophe, he has regained his footing, salvaged his soul and spirit, and after his wife's physical and mental recovery, he has had some time to return to the grand narratives that he cares about and is familiar with. It was around 2013 when Xi Jinping was in charge of China, and he once again plunged himself into the creation of what he called "the big skeleton of national sentiment", rethinking China and the CCP, and publishing books such as The Era of Slaying the Dragon (2013), Ghosts Pushing the Mill: Thirty Years of Chinese Magical Fantasy (1989-2019) (2020), and Wen shi jian (瘟世間) (2021). Ghosts Pushing the Mill also won the Grand Prize and Golden Butterfly Award at the 2021 Taipei International Book Exhibition.

In a four-hour interview with The Reporter, Su Xiaokang shared his thoughts and observations over the years. Based on his understanding of the Leninist Chinese Communist Party (CCP), as well as his many years of living in the United States, he analyzed how Deng Xiaoping's strategy of “tao guang yang hui”, which could be translated as “hide your strength, bide your time,” affected China and the world over the past 20 to 30 years, especially in 1989, which was the most important turning point in the history of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). How did he achieve unexpected "success" in the West? He bluntly states, “The West is at least half responsible for raising China.”

As the Chinese Communist Party, with which he has fought and with which his own destiny is entangled, approaches its centennial, what does Su Xiaokang think of the changes in China over the years? Why does he describe the party as “the learning curve of a dictator”, and how is it different from other totalitarian states? In the face of the “dictator's learning curve”, is there a “resister's learning curve” that can counterbalance the “China model? For Hong Kong, which had rescued him during his difficult times, and Taiwan, which he regarded as his “literary hometown”, how can people from both places think and act in the face of the ”totalitarian and prosperous“ Chinese Communist regime?

 

(The following interview is compiled by the journalists and presented in the first person.)

A party built on lies

 

I was born in 1949, and I have experienced the entire process of the emergence, disaster, rise and fall of the CCP and China. Later on, I went into exile to the US after the June 4th event and became a global citizen. To me, such identities like “peer” or  “peer of the Republic” are a bit old-fashioned. They only existed for a short period in the 1950s and even then only among children like me who live in the urban and never experienced hunger. By the end of the 1950s, there was the Great Famine. Soon after, the Chinese Cultural Revolution happened. Whether in urban or countryside, the children were suffering. How were they still able to identify with the so-called “motherland”?

As a “Chinese”, it was probably only when China entered the United Nations in 1971 that the concept of "nation" came to me. Later in the 1980s, when I was wanted by the Chinese government for the June 4 Incident and went into exile, I was able to look at China from a different perspective. To me, the monster of "nation" had carried a negative connotation, and I only became more and more heartbroken over the plight of the 1 billion or so Chinese people. For us, the “1949 generation”, we can separate the “country” from the “people”, which means we have abandoned this fake “republic”. If we look at China from the perspective of a “global citizen”, I think that firstly, we must reject and resist the expansion of the “China Model”; secondly, we need to find ways to prevent “Chinese Pollution” (Environmental Pollution) because “Chinese Pollution” will spread all over the world.

I lived in China for the first-half of my life and I lived in the US for 32 years. Essentially, I think there is no way to tell the truth under the Chinese system. If you want to talk about it, you may have to go to jail, and your family will be persecuted in various ways. It is not just these years that Chinese people start to talk about fake things, but recently, it has become even harder to talk about the truth. This doesn’t only apply to politics; it is even true to the extent that you cannot live if you do not tell lies. As time goes by, people get used to telling lies, and when they open their mouths, they tell lies, and the criterion of whether to tell lies or not is nothing else but their personal interests.

I was at  Princeton for 8 years and I didn’t have many interactions with international students. In 1990, I moved from Paris to Princeton. In the beginning, I lived in Princeton University graduate student housing. The Tiananmen Square Massacre had just happened one year before. To the Western world, it was an outrageous event, and there were almost no Chinese international students who didn’t condemn the massacre. The June 4th massacre had caused the CCP to collapse overnight in the overseas Chinese community in Europe and America. There was a community called “Independent Federation of Chinese Students and Scholars”(全美學自聯) which stood the position strongly against the CCP. Later on, in order to win over people’s hearts, Jiang Zeminand Hu Jintao would have to spend money buying them off.  Over time, the students began to change, and the newer the expatriates, the more nationalistic they became, which was of course the result of the brainwashing they had received in their home country.

However, most of those who come out will quickly accept western concepts and universal values, and only a few students who continue to work for the Chinese embassy for personal gain will be against the West. Now that the US has made China its number one enemy, and the US is purging “secret agents” from the country because of the many technologies stolen by China in the last 30 years, this category of students is expected to be silenced.

But comparing the Eastern and Western systems, in Western democracies, a lot of people are accustomed to telling lies, especially politicians... But when their lies cause harm, they have to pay a price, and there is no such mechanism in China, not at all. From Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping to the present day, China has always told lies, even on matters of national policy of great importance to the country. All the propaganda machines have lied to the people, and the list goes on and on.

One of the biggest things that the Communist Party has brainwashed the public about is the anti-Japanese war and the fight against Japan, which is a big lie. In the 1930s, the Communist Party did not fight against the Japanese at all, and we all know that it was the Kuomintang and Chiang Kai-shek who fought against the Japanese, and Mao Zedong and his men hid in Yan'an, and they came down to pick the peaches after the anti-Japanese war had succeeded. However, the anti-Japanese propaganda launched by the Communist Party in Mainland China nowadays. During the Jiang Zemin era, hundreds of anti-Japanese TV dramas were produced every year, but all of them were lies. All of the young people in mainland China are filled with lies. Lying can be so serious that the history of the past 100 years is full of lies, does it dare to tell the truth? This party will not be able to survive if it tells the truth about its 100 years of history.

Why do Chinese believe these lies?

The reasons that people believe China's lies are a bit complicated. This is because whether you choose to believe or not, you have to use your own judgment, and the basis of judgment comes from two sources: first, your own experience and second, your knowledge. Knowledge, I think, has now been tampered with by the Communist Party. He has also revised the history of the Party. Furthermore, China is a country without freedom of speech, and has banned all writings and publications criticizing the Communist Party, and has propagated falsehoods on television and in current publications. The upstream of the knowledge has been pinched off and thus what the Chinese are left with is merely personal experience. 

Therefore, young people who have never suffered under the Communist Party will always believe in it, and it is only after they have suffered losses that they start to hate and oppose it. For those who are older, those who came from the old days, those who came from the era of tyranny, their personal experience is there, and no matter how hard they try, they cannot erase it. Of course, there is a third situation, which is very common nowadays. This reflects the moral degradation of society in Mainland China, in which many people compromise with the regime for the sake of their own personal interests, or even become complicit.

What the CCP has done most successfully in the past 20 or 30 years is to brainwash the Chinese people with the nationalist ideology, and it has been very successful in brainwashing the following generations - the post-80s, the post-90s, and the post-00s. Those kids are just as old as my son, and the history they carry in their heads is all fake. They have become “immune” to Western universal values, and they question Western civilization, thinking that it doesn't matter whether China is democratic or not, because the United States is also not democratic.

The current state of affairs within mainland China is beyond words. China’s model of governance over the last 30 years cannot be deciphered by knowledge from any period or place, beyond experience and learning. Even all the authoritarian regimes in the world regard China as an “unattainable model”. The predictions of China were not only wrongly characterized as “economic development leading to democracy”, but also predicted “collapse” many times in the past 30 years, each time underestimating the regime's ability to survive.

In the face of such a super-hegemony, almost everyone, from Western academics to Chinese dissident intellectuals, is in a state of aphasia. Apart from repeating Mainland China's popular phrases such as “lying flat”, everyone has no language of their own, and the sense of powerlessness is obvious.

The dictator holds on to the gun and the pen, increasing control on all fronts

The so-called “Learning Curve of the Dictator” of the CCP after June 4 is to strengthen its control in all areas, and the most fundamental one is that it has succeeded in controlling the political development of the country. We see no organizations, no revolutionary parties, no mature leaders; yet China is full of heroes, full of Chen Shengs and Wu Guangs, Sun Yat-sens and Mao Zedongs.

The Communist Party is so backwards, but since the time of Mao Zedong, the Communist Party has known very well how to make use of knowledge and intellectuals. When we look back at history, we can see that if such a totalitarian government wants to adopt new technologies and new ways of governance, it must make use of intellectuals and knowledge. If you are totally anti-intellectual and remain in the situation of Yan'an, it is impossible to continue.

We know that those Middle East Islamic powers, Saddam Hussein in Iraq, Muammar Gaddafi in Libya, and those types were very rich at that time from selling oil, but they were the kind of people who rejected knowledge, technology, and educated people, and they were half of a theocratic society, rejecting knowledge and modernization. The Communist Party is not like that. The Communist Party is totally different from them. They use everything for themselves, and then when they’re done with you they throw you away; they screw you. The “United Front” is a conspiracy. It is a very confusing tactic to make you use all your power to serve me. This is just a sort of scheme from traditional Chinese history.

The Communist Party has a theory that “the barrel of the gun” and “the shaft of the pen” should not be left unattended. The barrel of the gun is the army, violence, but not only that, there is also the shaft of the pen, which is to deceive people, which is to have an ideology. The Western roots of Christianity, at least the so-called Protestantism that we see in the United States, they have a lot of principles, but the Communist Party has no beliefs, no rules whatsoever.

From exile, bewilderment and aphasia, to recovery through writing

I was a writer in reportage in China. Because of the June Fourth massacre, I was uprooted and thrown into a foreign society where I didn't even understand the language. In the early days of exile, my writing ability was faint. At the beginning, I couldn't even write words, nor could I write articles.

Later on, I had a “resurgence of writing”, which was a two-stage process. When I arrived in Paris, I wanted to write because many members of the media had asked me to write an article. I couldn't write a single word, my hands were shaking at that time. It is not true that you can write after you have been exiled because of how much you have written in China or how famous a writer you are. At least that's my experience: the 1980s itself was cut short, and the end was in Muxidi, where the June 4th massacre took place. The confusion, inarticulation, and fainting we experienced after exile were all due to the loss of “closure” -a sense of emptiness that is even more terrifying than failure.

When I went overseas, I missed the dozens of notebooks I left behind in mainland China, the ones I left behind when I was covering news. They were my riches, but I left them at home when I fled the country, and I thought it was impossible to get them back. “After 1989, the Communists came to my house to raid it, and if they saw these things, they confiscated them. Who knew that Fu Li-my wife-transferred all my notes, manuscripts, and presentations out of our house after June 4, entrusted them to someone for safekeeping, and then returned them to me in one piece, so that I could write a few more books based on them for the rest of my life? How many times have I looked through these notes and let them take me back to the 1980s? Fu Li is really a precious person to me! I used these notes as the basis for my later book, The Era of Slaying the Dragon.

After the car accident in 1993, I suffered from depression and stopped writing. For 20 years, I was wallowing in pain and couldn't pull myself out of it. In the eyes of others, this might seem narcissistic. But only I know myself that this kind of gnawing pain is a kind of contemplation on life and human nature, and a kind of precipitation of my past self, and it is rare for me to have the opportunity to have such a reflection in the exile community. It can be said that I have experienced a transformation.

When I was with Fu Li in the hospital, I just cried and felt sad. At that time, I unconsciously began to write down my own feelings, the feeling of despair and pain, on small pieces of paper. At that time, Yang Ze (楊澤) said, “Xiaokang, you will feel better if you write.” As a result, I wrote a column in the supplement of “Human World” in China Times, and wrote the column “Three Young and Four Strong” (三少四壯) for a year. After experiencing the disaster of The Loneliness of Delaware Bay, my first writing product won the sympathy and appreciation of readers in Taiwan. This kind of feedback is the panacea for my shock and aphasia. So I'm very lucky.

Looking at the stupidity of the West when I was resting, I was so angry

I moved from Princeton to Delaware when my wife was recuperating. For 15 years, I was in an environment where I didn’t have to interact with people. There were no Chinese people. That was my isolation period. I wrote two books, A Memoir of Misfortune and The Loneliness of Delaware Bay. After the car accident, I was given a remote, cold, isolated and lonely environment, where I could calmly regenerate myself as a new individual. At that time, the corruption of China, the utilitarianism of the world, and the inconsistency of the world had nothing to do with me. This is why I say exile and loneliness are not all negative.

 

Ji Ji (季季), a Taiwanese writer, summed up my writing works. She said, “There are two kinds of writing by Su Xiaokang, one is the major theme, the larger skeleton of national sentiment, and the other is the smaller narrative of his own personal state of mind.” Indeed, when I was in China, writing reportage literature, working on River Elegy, they were all about the bigger skeleton, writing about the anxiety of the society, the fate of the country, the so-called rise and fall of civilization, the rise and fall of the country, enlightenment, salvation, and that kind of thing, and in my youth I was also eager to make profit, including reportage literature, which is all about the big things.

Twenty years after the car accident, I was a “marginal” person in the United States, and the “marginal” perspective has its own special advantages. When Fu Li got better, in 2010, I started to accept interviews from media from various countries, and the Internet was already very popular then.

Why do I want to re-concern myself with the fate of China? For one thing, it's because of the “political apathy” of the Chinese people since June 4. We don't have "speech control" overseas, so can we remain silent? But the bigger motivation was not the CCP, it was the United States. I was so angry at the stupidity of the West. That's really where I started, and 2019's Ghosts Pushing the Mill is my return to the “bigger skeleton” theme.

Ghosts Pushing the Mill talks about how the West raised China

What I want to deal with is a very substantial and comprehensive problem. After the June 4 massacre, the CCP regime applied “hide your strength, bide your time” to deal with democratic countries such as the United States and Europe. The original intention of the strategy of “hide your strength, bide your time” was a big deception. Deng Xiaoping told Jiang Zemin to “hide your strength and bide your time”, which means that China must cover up the truth, conceal its ambitions and goals, greet the West with a smile, and ask the West to purchase Chinese goods.

Deng Xiaoping's “hide your strength, bide your time” started from such a low level, because he committed a massacre, and he couldn't explain it to the common people.

Deng Xiaoping knew this very well, so he wanted to boost the economy so that the common people would have food to eat and the Communist Party could rule the country. However, he never expected that his “hide your strength, bide your time” would be so successful!

I see the selfishness of the West (America first) being exploited by the CCP, just as previously feared by Richard Nixon, who said that the West cannot live without the “cheap labor of China”, and I think the CCP is using bad capitalism to deconstruct the West to form the essence of the so-called “globalization”. As Richard Nixon worried earlier, the West can't live without the "cheap labor of China". I think the CCP has deconstructed the West with bad capitalism and formed the essence of the so-called “globalization”. In this process, the West has fed China, and China has risen.

I think the West is partially responsible for the success of the “hide your strength, bide your time"scheme, which is also the result of the West's connivance with the CCP. Why do I call my book Ghosts Pushing the Mill? The West and China both look to the money, China pays for its (the West's) economic woes, and the West's economy and trade are intertwined with China's, through cheap labor and a large market. The money is taken by the West and the totalitarian government of China, and China gets rich, which is what “the ghosts push the mill” means.

Also after 1989, another CCP veteran, Chen Yun (陳雲), proposed that “power should still be handed over to our own children”, which made the CCP completely return to the state of the feudal ruling group. It has gone through the transition of two generations of technocrats, Jiang Zemin and HuJintao, and entered the era of XiJinping. Xi Jinping's ultimate goal is to realize the Chinese dream of “controlling the world through five steps” relying on the major strategies of “Made in China 2025”, “Belt and Road Initiative”, “5G Network”, “Financial Technology” and “RMB replaces the US dollar”.

Why is Xi Jinping so savage? Because China has 200 trillion dollars in its hands, and China has suddenly become the richest regime in the world, 200 trillion dollars - 100 trillion dollars of fixed assets, 100 trillion dollars of cash savings, the Chinese government is a double–hundred trillion dollar government; never in the history of mankind has there been a totalitarian government with so much financial power, or a totalitarian government that is so bad, with such a huge amount of wealth in its hands. This is a problem that no human being has ever encountered before. This is the problem that we are facing now.

After the June 4 massacre, this strategy of Deng Xiaoping enabled the Communist Party to successfully overcome three major hurdles:

Firstly, it overcame the legitimacy crisis of the June 4 massacre.

Secondly, it overcame the market economy. The communist states are incompatible with the market economy, but China has actually developed a set of capitalism under totalitarianism, which is much more powerful than the capitalism under the democratic system.

Third, it overcame the Internet society. Because of its information-sharing nature, people can see everything online, which makes the Internet inherently opposed to the totalitarian system. But the CCP created an Internet society that works like George Orwell’s 1984. By mastering and distorting information through “digital Leninism”, CCP not only is not harmed by Internet, but is hardened and made more powerful and evil than ever before.

The knowledge of “totalitarianism” accumulated in the Western academic world is unable to explain the "invincibility of the East". Especially now that this “digital Leninism” is being used to organize the world, he is going to subvert the Western democratic system, and indeed he has been very successful in doing so. This newest scientific tool of mankind has been taken by the Communist Party and successfully used for our own purposes, and this is what makes it so powerful.

It took 30 years for the West to realize that the Chinese Communist Party had shifted from the Cold War to a different kind of economic competition, trying to keep the totalitarian system alive by reforming the market economy. Because the West found out that China has never honored the agreements in the World Trade Organization (WTO), such as the Internet can't have firewalls. I have attended various congressional hearings in the U.S., and firewalls for the Internet are a common practice in totalitarian countries such as Iran, but China does not honor them; and now China is stealing the most advanced technology from the U.S. in various areas. Before this plague, the U.S. woke up. After 30 years of trading with China, the U.S. has suffered a great loss and started a trade war, asking China to payback.

To a great extent, the rise of the CCP was caused by the mistakes of the West. The rise of China as well as the shrinkage and failure of Chinese civil society have provided the world with contrary examples, which demonstrate that economic growth does not necessarily lead to social democratization, and globalization does not carry universal values. Trump's Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, sees clearly that the only way to secure the safety of the U.S. and Western free and democratic societies, is to overthrow the Chinese Communist regime. And then we can deal normally with China.

Generations of Chinese Protestors are “broken” helplessly

My River Elegy is about the Yellow River moving towards the sea, that is, China should open up to the outside world and make such an appeal. In Xi Jinping's era, the rise of a great nation towards the Pacific Ocean has turned China into an expanding civilization, which has a completely different context and historical background. Now China is under internal blockade, cultural confinement, blocking the Internet and preventing people from receiving information from the outside world, which is a closed-door policy. A new closed country, a spiritually closed country, is the most terrible thing.

In addition to the awakening of foreign countries, I am also thinking about where is the “learning curve for rebels” internally in China compared to the “learning curve for dictators” in China? Because the weakening and degeneration of a totalitarian society must be caused by the growth of dissident parties.

But from my observation, the dissident parties and rebels in China are completely self-sustained. There are several categories of rebels in China: the generation of rebels who came out after 1989, and then the generation who formed political parties, such as the group of people who formed the “China Democracy Party” in 1998. Being arrested by the Communist Party and sentenced to a very severe punishment, the generation of forming political parties is totally gone in today’s world. The following is the generation of rights defenders (also known as the “Jasmine Generation”). This generation has survived, and most of them are now overseas. The Cultural Revolution generation like us is completely different from the 1989 generation, the party-forming generation, and the rights-defending generation. We do not necessarily agree or be convincing with one another, nor do we communicate well, which is a pity.

I attach great importance to the generation of rights defenders. The new generation is quite mature in terms of strategy. They are indeed much more mature than the 1989 generation. Although they were suppressed, they have left behind a lot of their techniques of resistance and so on. Now who are the following rebels? I don't know.

But when we talk about resistance, we are actually talking about the occurrence, emergence and growth of civil society. This is actually what Liu Xiaobo wanted to work towards during his lifetime. Why did he insist on having peaceful, rational and non-violent dialogues with the government and the Communist Party? It was because he believed that under such a harsh and repressive system, the people must use peace and reason to fight for a “gray area”, to survive and expand slowly, rather than taking the path of radical revolution. Of course, many people oppose his view. This is of course an issue that can be debated.

The rebels have to fight for the expansion of civil society. Civil society exists in abundance under the Communist Party system. For example, Christianity, Falun Gong, women's rights organizations, all these civil society organizations outside the system are civil society, and the stronger they grow, the weaker the system becomes. The more they grow, the weaker the system becomes. In order to expand the links between these civil society organizations, it is necessary to allow for a lower level of consensus, and to form certain links between them. It is only in this way that the rebels can eventually rely on civil society to become strong enough to have a dialogue with the system and negotiate the conditions for building the foundation of a constitutional government.

A movement needs to have resistance, but leaders are also very important. Liu Xiaobo was the only mature opinion leader I saw, and he was killed by them in the end. It is not enough to kill him, they want to sink his ashes to the bottom of the sea.

Applying the old-schooled unified system to Hong Kong is cruel

The Communist Party's Xi Jinping wants to prove that the “China Model” can be successful even outside the borders of China, and the first testing ground he can choose is Hong Kong. Xi Jinping very much wants to go to Taiwan for testing, but he cannot cross the Taiwan Strait. Now, there is only one Hong Kong, and he is using Hong Kong as a test case to prove his “China Model” and to bring the same thing that he has done in China to Hong Kong.

However, he did not expect to meet this group of Hong Kong people, Hong Kong people are mainly Cantonese, don't underestimate the Cantonese, the Cantonese are the “cradle” of Sun Yat-sen, the League of Alliance, and even earlier, the White Lotus Sect and the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom in modern China. The Cantonese have such an underground society, which has formed an excellent tradition of fighting against the Qing Dynasty.

In fact, ambitious in occupying and conquering Hong Kong, Xi Jinping would encounter a difficulty: people of Hong Kong will keep fighting against him - of course, I have said this many times because I was rescued by the people of Hong Kong in the “Yellow Bird Operation”, and it is very heartbreaking for me to see such a situation in Hong Kong. Xi Jinping's game is played in this way: If you, Jimmy Lai , are stubborn, and if you put up a fight, then I will wipe out your Apple Daily.

I think the fate of Hong Kong people today is the result of the British returning Hong Kong to China. It had been outside of China for 100 years. It had lived under a Western system and culture for 100 years, and the people of Hong Kong have been created. When it went back to China, the old political framework of the late Qing Dynasty, which has been left behind, had to be applied to the people of Hong Kong, which was really very cruel.

Today, I would like to raise a question: Is it possible for Hong Kong people to fight for another chance to leave China? No matter what the future of China is, I am leaving you. I think this is what Hong Kong people have to consider, their tomorrow.

Taiwan has to fight for its lot with the CCP regime

Mine is totally an outsider's opinion. People in Taiwan today really need to have a big vision. That is to say, what kind of position are you in? Taiwan is in a very, very special location, between the oceanic continents, your back is the Pacific Ocean is so big, you are facing such a large Asian continent, has been extended out of the continent, not only China, and extends all the way back to Russia.

Then you are between China and the United States, and you are between modernity and tradition. In the end, you are between the “waishengren” (外省人), the Chinese people who moved to Taiwan with the KMT after 1945, and “benshengren” (本省人), those who settled in Taiwan before 1945. The position between these several brings numerous extremely complicated factors. In the midst of this, Taiwan must hold on to democracy, you have to have a democratic system that can compete and can be rotated, and all internal conflicts should be mitigated and resolved as the highest principle, rather than intensifying it and making it even more explosive. Then, the middle way - the “middle way” of traditional Chinese Confucianism, the "middle way" - and the status quo will be the best choice. Taiwan's social conflicts are not from the outside, they are internal, and the outside is a pressure that pressurizes your internal conflicts, such as welfare, race, color, gender, wealth, and so on, all day long. Don't let these conflicts capsize the ship of Taiwan.

To a certain extent, you have to compare your lot with that of the regime in China. When the Xi Jinping regime collapses in China, the one that comes after it may or may not be a communist regime, I don't know, but the pressure for unification will not be there. At that time, Taiwan will make its own choice and do whatever it wants.

Secondly, Xi Jinping has been playing around like this, and I don't know how much he has squandered and how much he has left. This system, this regime, itself is also looking at whether it can let him continue to mess around.

From about 2021, there was a call for a “rotation” in China, and we just saw a speech circulating from the country, a very strong speech, saying that Xi Jinping is the guy you pinched out (note: this refers to the 2018 amendment to the Chinese Constitution, which abolished presidential term limits and initiated a system of power centralization), the guy we swallowed like shit. This was said by Cai Xia (蔡霞), a professor at the Party School of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China. She herself is a scholar, but she represents a force behind her, and that is the force in the Communist Party, not the force of the people. After she said that, Xi Jinping wanted to arrest her, and she can't be in China anymore.

Now, there is a great exodus from China, everyone who can afford it, whether they are officials, businessmen, cultural workers, has run out, and the 1 billion people who can't do anything can't go anywhere. The reason is not only the political pressure, but the pressure of environmental pollution. There are thousands of cancer diagnoses in China every day, and its environment has been devastated by the economic takeoff over the years.

Therefore, when talking about China's “prosperous era” over the past decade or so, the “prosperous era” is a false impression.  A famous mainland scholar Zi Zhongyun wrote to a friend in 2019: “Beijing, Tianjin, Shanghai, three major cities, can be described as a fiery oil-burning trend, the countryside of the brocade and prosperity,” so that she despaired; but I say that in fact, it is a “drunkenness and dreaming”. Why? I can't see the future, I can’t envision prospects, but we all have to live, and we are rich and extravagant.