By U.S. Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL)
Newsweek
Today marks the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). The CCP will ensure that the occasion is met with pomp and circumstance in order to maintain a thin veneer of legitimacy. But nobody should forget the long history of the CCP’s atrocities and the persistent dark side of its heavy-handed rule.
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The CCP rose to power through indiscriminate acts of violence and cruelty. After the Second World War, the CCP again betrayed the Nationalist government and launched a nationwide campaign of destruction…
Once the CCP successfully took charge, it attacked virtually anyone with ties to the former Nationalist government. At least 5 million civilians met an early grave during the CCP’s first tyrannical decade.
As bleak as the first few years were, the worst was yet to come. In 1958, CCP Chairman Mao Zedong initiated the “Great Leap Forward,” a harebrained plan to rapidly industrialize the Chinese economy…
The result was the worst famine in history. As one historian put it, “China descended into hell.” At least 45 million people died, with starvation so widespread that many resorted to cannibalism.
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The CCP has conspired for decades to transform and destroy local identities in Tibet and now Xinjiang. These campaigns of cultural erasure have slowly stripped Tibetans, Uyghurs and other ethnic groups of their culture, language, faith and way of life…
After the famine ended in 1962, Mao managed to retain power for more than a decade by waging his infamous “Cultural Revolution.” …
The campaign created mass hysteria and unthinkable violence, with constant “struggle sessions” against those suspected of disloyalty to the CCP. Mobs of radicals would drag innocents into the public square, accuse them of political crimes and beat them, often to death.
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The Chinese people continue to live under the threat of political violence and suffer systemic human rights abuses, epitomized by the CCP’s massacre of hundreds, likely thousands, of peaceful protesters in Tiananmen Square in June 1989.
Furthermore, the CCP’s so-called “reform era” brought us the greatest attack on the sanctity of the family— the most important institution in traditional Confucian society—in all of history: the “one-child policy,” which resulted in an estimated 400 million state-mandated abortions and sterilizations. These same evils are now being utilized to commit genocide against Uyghurs and other Muslims, more than a million of whom suffer today in Xi Jinping’s labor and detention camps.
The CCP’s so-called “reform era” has most recently brought us the effective destruction of a free Hong Kong. Across the entire country, the CCP has closed thousands of Christian churches, banned the Falun Gong outright and imprisoned or disappeared hundreds of lawyers who defend the CCP’s victims in court.
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The CCP’s reform era amounted to nothing by the measure that matters most: creating lives of purpose protected by freedom and fundamental rights. Even the economic gains are starting to slip away thanks to the CCP’s mismanagement. Why? Because this is the Chinese Communist Party. This is who it has been for 100 years, and it is who it will be for the next 100 if we fail to stand up to its tyranny…
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