A Timeline of Atrocities committed by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)
Deciphering all the euphemism for totalitarianism, democide and oppression from the early beginings until anno 2020
The history of the Chinese Communist Party(CCP) and therefore their atrocities doesn’t actually begin with the proclamation of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1949, it starts much earlier. Being founded in July 1921, with its origins going back to the May Fourth Movement of 1919, the Chinese Communists, back then more commonly referred to as Communist Party of China (CPC) stayed largely irrelevant until the beginning of the Chinese Civil War and consequently that’s when the CCP’s atrocities began.
Here in the West, outside of the Sinosphere, everyone learns about WWII, including the preceding years and both the European and the Pacific Theatre, yet few ever get to hear much about the Chinese Civil War, which waged throughout China from 1927 to 1949, being interrupted from 1937 to 1945 by nothing less than WWII. A catastrophic war that would lead to the loss of 9.5 million lives, most of them civilian casualties. Before we begin with the timeline however, a short history lesson seems appropriate…
A Brief Historical Context
China around the 1910s–1920s was a tumultuous place. Few occasions in history are comparable to this period of widespread chaos and disorganization. The Qing Dynasty was dismantled rather suddenly with the Wuchang Uprising in 1911, culminating in what is now known as the Xinhai Revolution of the same year. This brought not only the end of the Qing Dynasty but the end of Imperial China with it.
During the downward spiraling of the Empire, the Republicans, a coalition of anti-Qing secret societies (like the Tongmenghui 同盟會, Tiandihui 天地會 and Gelaohui), numerous warlords as well as various other revolutionary groups, formed the Provisional Government of the Republic of China, with Sun Yat-Sen as the first Provisional President. These various groups were held together by their shared desire for Nationalism, Republicanism, National unity and the modernization of China. Though their ideas and aspirations to rejuvenate the Chinese nation were admirable, the immediate period after the fall of the Qing was plagued by much the same turmoil and lawlessness often lamented under the now disposed late-Qing, if not worse. If the source of all this post-revolutionary chaos could be personified, its name would be Yuan Shikai. Yuan was a carry-over from the Qing Dynasty, and knew how to cling to his power. Under the Qing, he was the Governor of Shandong and oversaw the New Armies (also called New Army), China’s first army trained and armed completely in the style of the West. With the beginning of the Wuchang Uprising, he was even elevated to the position of Prime Minister, and was expected to quell the Rebellion like numerous other rebellions that have been quelled before (see the Taiping Rebellion in the late 1800s). Being the machiavellian he was however, Yuan Shikai quickly came to the realization that his use for the Qing Dynasty would only last as long as the Rebellion is active. So he cut a deal with Sun Yat-sen, leading to Yuan Shikai getting the child emperor Puyi to abdicate.
Sun Yat-sen is commonly known as the father of the modern Chinese Republic. He founded the Revive China Society 興中會 in 1894 which would later merge with the Tongmenghui which he too co-founded and would in turn become the Nationalist Party (numerous iterations of the Nationalist Party exist, which are all collectively named “Kuomintang”). Unbeknownst to many however, Sun Yat-sen didn’t stay First Provisional President for long as his end of the deal involved stepping down and giving the presidency to Yuan Shikai for his part in bringing the Old empire down. It was probably not Sun Yat-sen’s own idea to compromise with the likes of Yuan Shikai, but as he lacked significant military power this proved to be the most pragmatic way to achieve his end goal. Yuan Shikai went on to form a government right in Beijing, now known as the Beiyang Government or the First Republic. From the outside, things seemed like they were on the right track for the first time in a long time. But there was one fundamental problem:
Yuan Shikai and the new Republic of China were like oil and water.
In the democratic elections for the National Cabinet in 1913, the Nationalist Party emerged victorious and their Song Jiaoren was eyed to become a candidate for the office of Prime Minister. One of the main goals of Song Jiaoren was to ensure the separation of powers between Parliament and President, much to the dismay of Yuan Shikai who desired to hold even more executive power. And so, in 1913 Yuan Shikai began a crackdown of the Nationalist Party, internally and externally. Song Jiaoren himself was the victim of an assassination in March of 1913 for which, as historians have concluded, Yuan Shikai was most likely responsible. Seeing his party in such disarray, Sun Yat-sen fled to Japan in August 1913 and called for a “Second Revolution”. This Second Revolution was poorly planned, ill-prepared and ultimately fell flat. Yuan Shikai countered, by declaring the Nationalist Party as a seditious organization and excluded all their members from parliament (sound familiar, anyone?).
The next year, in 1914, he officially dissolved the parliament and picked members from his own cabinet to create a new document with the intention of overriding the preexisting constitution. Sun Yat-sen’s “Second Revolution” was shattered. Yuan Shikai held the Republic hostage, but that seemingly wasn’t enough as in 1915 (a year so chaotic that 2020 couldn’t hold a candle to it), Yuan Shikai came up with one last suprise. One last surprise to rule them all…
Yuan Shikai proclaimed a new Chinese Empire and set himself up as the Emperor. You read that right, while in Europe and the Pacific WWI was waged, in China a young Republic and a young “Empire” were fighting against each other in the 護國戰爭(“National Protection War”). Though the National Protection War was technically a civil war, it was a very short one. Numerous provinces declared themselves independent of the Empire that was formally due to begin on the first of January 1916. After numerous military defeats and declining health, the self-styled Hongxian Emperor abdicated in March of 1916 and went back to his role as the President. He wouldn’t be acting out his role as President for long however, as he died on 6 June 1916. Why exactly he tried to re-establish an empire is still a point of contention. One hypothesis is that he was talked into it by his son and foreign influences. With Yuan Shikai out of the picture, the National Assembly of the Republic was reopened in August 1916. Was now finally the time, that the central government gained leadership of the country and peacefully lead it to a prosperous democracy?
Quite to the contrary, peace would in fact not return to China in the 20th century and even in the new millenia, we are still waiting for this to happen -a conclusion you surely will also come to after having read this article. Even during his time as the President of the Republic, Yuan Shikai did a lot of long-lasting damage to the modern China. For example, he made large concessions to foreign powers, including the Japanese, leading to a loss of face for China in the international community as well a loss of morale within China. But even more detrimental was the aforementioned New Army, now redubbed Beiyang Army, China’s first modern army that he built up and led from the turn of the century until 1915. Yuan Shikai’s proclamation of a new Chinese Empire was widely opposed and the generals of the Beiyang army by and large ceased their support for Yuan Shikai. After Yuan’s death in 1916, the Beiyang army split into cliques, which all vied for supremacy . These cliques fought not only against each other but against numerous other provincial armies as well. What followed was the decade of warlods.
1927
Bloody soil, rotten tree
The aforementioned backdrop proved a valuable substrate for the concept of Communism to take root in China. But the beginning of the CCP itself was far from orderly. In early June of 1921, due to the urging of the Soviet Comintern, 57 members from various Communist cells all over China got together in a Shanghainese Shikumen-style brick building to establish what we now know as the Chinese Communist Party. Some historians estimate that during 1927–1931 in the province of Jiangxi alone 186,000 civilians lost their lives due to this sheer madness. In fact, these antihuman excesses were so bad that even the CCP condemned Mao for his actions in 1931.
1934
“Long March” into the Night
Coming soon
1940–1949
1948
Siege of Changchun
Coming soon
1949
Birth of the “People’s” One-Party State
Coming soon
Laogai 劳改: The Chinese Gulag?
I might be wrong, but there seems to be a red thread going across all totalitarian regimes, apart from ther general disregard of human rights that is. I am talking about brutal labor camps, where along with genuine criminals, political and ideological enemies as well as the still-red hot ambers, vestiges from of the revolution, are disappeared. The camps might or might not have been used as death camps at some point. Regardless, many people still perished in them due to the harsh treatment and in some cases downright horrendous conditions. The Nazis had the “Konzentrationslager”(concentration camp), the Russians had the “ГУЛАГ” (Gulag) and the Chinese had one too. It was called 劳改(Laogai)…
Despite their mundane name, translated in English as “reform through labor” this system of prison camps focused on penal labor were notorious for being the dumping ground for political and ideological enemies of the CCP leadership, from their conception soon after the founding of the PRC through the 50s, 60s and much of the 70s. Again, this is an eerie parallel to their Western counterparts, as the KZ (in the early years) and the Gulag occupied a similar role. These labor camps were only renamed “prisons” in 1994 but the system still exists to this day, though not used as extensively. Information about the exact network of prison farms and what products they manifacture are currently classified. The products processed there range from green tea all the way to coal dug from mines by the inmates. Some of these products might even have been exported and might well have found their way into your household. There’s no way of being 100% sure as the Chinese authorities are still tight-lipped about this subject. Forced labor camps still appear to be such a sensitive subject, that in May 2012 Al Jazeera’s reporting on this issue caused them to be expelled from China. In fact, even though the 1997 Criminal Procedure Law revision officially put an end to the forced Laogai practice, many prisons in Qinghai and Tibet still practise it. In the last couple of years, attention has been brought on the topic of forced labor camps in Xinjiang, disguised as vocational camps,which are rumored to currently have more than 1 million detaineees.
The Laogai Research Foundation, which was founded by a certain Harry Wu, estimated in 2008 that in the ~1045 Laogai camps still operating in China, between 500,000 and 2 million people were being detained. The founder of the Laogai Research Foundation, the aforementioned Harry Wu, was himself a political prisoner in a Laogai from 1960 to 1979 and wrote extensively (think the Gulag archipelago but in China) on the topic of Laogai camps. Now, at this point you might ask what it was that got him imprisoned. Did he commit a crime? Not really, it was something as mundane as speaking out about the violent Soviet suppression of the Hungarian (Anti-Soviet) Uprising in 1956, during a period called the Hundred Flowers Campaign (we’ll talk about this in lengths later on). It was the use of his critical faculties alone that put the then 19-year old Harry Wu onto the radar of the Central Government, which monitored him until he was charged in 1960, during a movement called the Anti-Rightist Campaign (we’ll talk about this in lengths too), causing him to be thrown into a Laogai.
It is estimated by that in the the last 50 years, about 50 million people passed through these camps and between 15 million, according to R.J. Rommel and Jean-Louis Margolin, and 20 million people, according to Harry Wu perished in them. In comparison to the historical consensus on Soviet Gulags, about 18 million people were incarcerated at some time and about 1.3-1.5 million people died there. In other words, more than twice the amount of people passed China’s Laogai system and 10 to 15 times as many people never left alive compared to the Soviet Gulags! Mao Zedong biographer Jun Chang and historian Jon Holliday estimate that possibly 27 million people perished in prisons and labor camps during Mao’s rule alone…. that’s more than the modern day population of North Korea or Australia!
PRC: “People’s Republic of Classicide”
Many horros the CCP committed after the founding of seemed to be already perfected. One of them were the so called “Struggle sessions”. A kind of public humiliation and torture, with the characteristics of a mock trial.
China at this time was still a mostly agrarian country with a -now and then- seemingly impossible amount of mouths to feed. This direction was changed in a 180° with the xxx in 1946
Coming soon
1950–1959
1950
Invasion of de-facto independent Tibet:
The area of the Tibetan plateau, also known as rooftop of the world used to be the mere core area of the Tibetan Empire, which lasted from the 7th century to 9th century AD, at its greatest extent rivaling even the Tang Dynasty. After the decline of the Tibetan Empire, it splintered into many different regions, namely Ü-Tsang, Kham and Amdo, which would intermittently switch hands between Tibetan and foreign rulers.
In 1720, the Qing Dynasty sent an expedition to Tibet which expelled the reigning Dzunghar Khanate and established a Chinese protectorate which lasted up to the early Xinhai revolution, which would overthrow the Qing Dynasty.
Though the Tibetan regime was under administrative rule of the Qing Dynasty, the latter could not effectively assert control over the region. This was especially evident throughout the early 20th century, when in 1903 Britain launched an expedition into Tibet, whose purpose was to cull suspected Russian influence in the region. The British troops were met only with severely underarmed Tibetan forces led by (among others) the 13th Dalai Lama, which they massacred, not the armies of the Qing. The expedition ended in 1904 (even though British troops were stationed in Chumbi valley until 1908) when, Francis Younghusband forced the Treaty of Lhasa onto Tibet, which was reaffirmed 2 years later through the Sino-British treaty between the Qing and the British Empire in 1906. Many Tibetans by this point have reached boiling point and wanted the foreign invaders, including the Qing out. It was against this backdrop when the Tibetan Rebellion occured in 1905, during which under the incitement of Tibetan lamas, Tibetan Catholic converts were massacred and French missionaries and Qing officials assassinated. This rebellion was put down by the Qing Dynasty with a punitive expedition led by General Zhao Erfeng, who would later in 1910 lead another Qing Expedition into Tibet, earning him the nickname “Zhao the Butcher”. As a result of the latter expedition, the 13th Dalai Lama was driven out of Tibet and fled to nearby India.
The effects of the 2 Qing expeditions would however end up being futile, as one of the afterwaves of the Wuchang Uprsing in China proper, was the Xinhai Lhasa turmoil. Upon hearing the news of the ongoing revolution in the main provinces, Qing troops began fighting against each other, plunging Tibet into a state of anarchy, essentially ending Qing rule in Tibet. During the turmoil Zhao Erfeng, at the time governor of Sichuan, was executed by ROC radicals after which the 13th Dalai Lama took up leadership of Tibet and escorted all remaing Qing troops out of Tibet. Finally free of foreign influence, Tibet would for the next 36 years Tibet act, in every respect, as an independent nation. It was during this time the 14th Dalai Lama was born, who will later on become an important figure in the Tibetan struggle for self-determination. Though internationally Tibet was never recognized to be de-jure independent, in 1913 Tibet and Mongolia signed a mutual-recognition treaty.
In 1949, in order to keep the CCP away, the ROC delegation in Tibet’s capital Lhasa was ordered out and a letter sent to the UK, US and a copy of that letter to Mao Zedong declaring that Tibet if push comes to shove will defend itself “by all possible means” against the CCP. Short in time, modernization and enlarging the military was attempted swiftly.
“Tibet will remain independent as it is at present, and we will continue to have very close ‘priest-patron’ relations with China. Also, there is no need to liberate Tibet from imperialism, since there are no British, American or Guomindang imperialists in Tibet, and Tibet is ruled and protected by the Dalai Lama (not any foreign power)”
— Tsebon W.D. Shakabpa
However, the CCP would have none of that. Earlier, the ROC government donned a more reconciliatory tone and tried to mend the relationship by apologising for the treatment they endured under the Qing, however the 13th Dalai Lama insisted that Tibet is would be a self-governed nation. After the CCP’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) defeated KMT forces and forced their retreat out of mainland China, the CCP set its sight onto the Qing’s frontier regions. In order to pressure the Tibetan government into negotiations, Mao already ordered preparations for a march into Tibet at Chamdo to be made in December 1949. After months of failed negotiations, culminating with meeting between the Tibetan delegation and General Yuan Zhongxian as ambassador of the newly declared PRC in Delhi, India on 16 September 1950, the CCP would finally show its true, ugly face.
On 6 October 1950, less than 2 weeks before the PRC would enter the Korean War, the PLA crossed the Jinsha River, crossing the de-facto border with Tibet at 5 different places in the process, and entered the Kham region. Two PLA units pushed towards the border town of Chamdo. The outnumbered Tibetan forces were outnumbered and quickly surrounded during the Battle of Chamdo by 19 October 1950. This first PLA incursion wasn’t meant as a total invasion but as a punitive expedition into Tibet in order to force them to agree to annexation by the PRC. Accordingly, after the blitz success at Chamdo, the PLA ceased any advances, waiting for any Tibetan delegations to Beijing. Under the pressure of the PRC, in October 1951 the Seventeen Point Agreement was signed and Tibet came under the control of the PRC. Would the Tibetan people accept this forceful annexation? If you want to find out, read on…
China unexpectedly joins the Korean War on the side of North Korea
Even before the war, Korea was already a partitioned country. After Japan surrendered and WWII was finally over in the Pacific Theater as well, Korea was divided into 2 occupations zones. The northern half was administered by the Soviets and the southern half was administered by the US. During the slow ramp-up of the Cold War, both occupation zones become sovereign nations, their economies influenced by the former occupying forces, divided only by a line close to the 38th parallel north.
On June 25 1950, North Korea crossed this border and advanced further into South Korea, a move the UN would denounce as an invasion. The early war, which saw North Korea supported by forces from the Soviet Union against South Korea supported by forces from 22 UN-nations, was intially in North Korea’s favor, bringing the Southern Korean coalition forces almost to the point of deafeat until they managed to consolidate their position behind the Pusan Perimeter during the Battle of Pusan Perimeter. Shortly followed by the Battle of Inchon, an amphibious counter-offense, UN forces managed to encircle and capture many North Korean troops. Those troops who escaped capture retreated back north, which gave UN troops the opportunity to progress into North Korean territory and move up the Yalu river, close to North Korea’s border to the PRC, in less than a month.
On October 19 1950, in the same year as the Battle of Chamdo, the unexpected happened. PVA (Chinese People’s Volunteer Army) forces crossed the Yalu river and joined the Korean War on the North Korean side. The PVA forces, which numbered almost 1.5 million at the height of the conflict gave North Korea the needed second wind to push the UN forces back out of North Korea and advance anew into South Korea.
At this point, it should be mentioned that despite the title, the PVA was actually Eventually, the UN forces managed to push the North Korean coalition forces back close to the demarkation between North and South Korea where the war eventually begun, where both sides consolidated and the conflict turned into a war of attrition until the open war would only end in late July in 1953, after both sides agreed to an armistice.
I just can’t help but imagine how much different history would have been if there had been a united Korea, especially already in the 1950s. Would there the (South) Korean corrupt and unstable government have been overthrown long before 1988? About this, I can only speculate. What I can say for sure is, that a war that could have ended in half a year didn’t have to be prolonged to last almost 3 years, causing about 6 million human lives, half of them civilian casualties. “Civilian casualty” isn’t really a euphemism, but I strongly feel like this doesn’t quite capture the fact that 3 million children, women, elderly people and other noncombatants lost their life.
Furthermore, do you think the PRC joined the war primarily in order to help out an ideological ally or in oder to “smash the capitalists”? The answer is obvious if you just look at what the Korean War is called in China: 抗美援朝戰爭 (“War to Resist America and Aid Korea”). And on top of all that, North Korea and South Korea are technically still at war, though it is a frozen war. A war started by North Korea and prolonged by the PRC…
1954
Hukou 户口, an ancient Chinese system refurbished for totalitarian times:
Back in Semptember 21 1949, when the PRC was founded, it was a highly agrarian country with almost 90% of its 500+ million inhabitants living in the counryside. Due to its inhabitants searching for better economic opportunities in the cities, the urban population skyrocketed in the following years. The sheer scale scale of movement of people and thus labor force was an obstacle for the government, which wanted to control the loss of resources that left the countryside toward the cities. A plan for this enterprise was first published in 1950 by Luo Reiqing (Minister of Public Security) and within just four years, citizens both urban and rural were registered with the state and stringent regulations on the conversion of Hukou status were in place. In essence, rural citizens could now only migrate to the city if they either had family there, proof of employment or proof of college admission. Further, all employment of rural workers in the city would be controlled entirely by local authorities. The Hukou system as most people nowadays have come to known appeared in 1958, when the People’s Republic of China Hukou Registration Regulation, which grouped the entire PRC’s populace by divided the PRC’s populace into nongmin, with an agricultural hukou, and shimin, with a non-agricultural hukou.
What were the consequences of this system? Well, state-welfare systems (which heavily favored urban citizens) were tied to the Hukou status. And with an annual Hukou status transfer rate of only 0.15% to 1.5% this essentially created a two-tiered populace. The city dwellers were given ration cards for everyday necessities (like food and textiles) and were provided housing, education and a retirement plan while rural population was excluded from all those privileges.
To put it in words similar to George Orwell:
“All citizens are equal, but some citizens are more equal than others”
As if it weren’t enough enough, these regulations were fruthered in 1964 and 1977. An unexpected but nonetheless disastrous side effect of the Hukou would show itself during the Great Famine but more on that later on…
1955
Sufan movement
1956
Hundred Flowers Movement 百花齊放:
Coming soon
1957
The Anti-Rightist Movement that doesn’t do its name justice 大躍進:
Coming soon
1958
The “Great Leap Forward” into Catastrophe
Coming soon
1959
Great Chinese Famine 三年大饥荒:
Coming soon
1960–1969
1966
The Cultural Revolution against Humanity
Coming soon
1967
Hong Kong Riots: Instigated by the CCP?
1970–1979
1975
Khmer Rouge: Cambodia drenched in blood
Coming soon
1978
Inferno of Karamay
1980–1989
1989
Massacre on the Square of Heavenly Peace
Coming soon
1990–1999
1994
Inferno of Karamay
In the PRC, the party that is the Chinese Communist Party(CCP) is above everything else. In order to advance in certain social and professional strata it is necessary to be a member of the CCP The PRC's military, the People's Liberation Army is a part of the Chinese Communist Party. The illusion that the military serves the state comes from the very fact that the PRC is a one party state and that party is the Communist Party (there are other parties around, sure. But their significance, especially in lawmaking is negligible at best, rubber stamping at worst.). It's not very surpising that as a result of this configuration, party members are above (or at least see themselves as above) ordinary citizens. And so in 1994 in Karamy, a prefecture-level city in Xinjiang province this was proven to be true in one of the worst loss of young lives in a single disaster. In the evening of the 8th December, about 1000 children, teachers and governemnt officals were watching a variety show at the Friendship theatre of Karamy. What exactly caused the fire is unknown, but it according to the Xinhua (state-owned) news agency, it was most likely faulty wiring of electrical spotlights that caused them to go up in fire around 6:20PM after which the curtains immedatiately went up in flames too, quickly spreading the fire among the interior. This alone is pretty bad but it's what happened next that turned this accident into a man-made disaster. It is rumored that a female CCP official immediately after the start of the fire shouted:
同學們坐下、不要動、讓領導先走 (Students sit down; don’t move. Let the leaders walk out first).
There is contradicting information online as if this was actually said by someone. What is proven however, is that no official died that night, as they were either the first to get out of the theatre or as in the case of (Kuang Li) the vice-director at the education center of the the local state-petroleum company have locked themselves in the women’s cloackroom which could have provided shelter from the fire for around 30 people. Instead, around 100 dead bodies were later found heaped up outsde of the cloack room. On this tragic evening, 325 lives were reportedly lost, 288 of them being school children.
周雲蓬 (Zhou Yun Peng), a blind Chinese folk singer has included this tragedy in his song, which compiles a list of Chinese man-made disasters and the circumstances that caused them. He actually begins the song with:
不要做克拉瑪依的孩子，火燒痛皮膚讓親娘心焦
(Don't want to be the children of Karamy, the fire that burned their skin also scorched their mothers hearts)
In fact, one of the lines from the song 讓領導先走 (Let the leaders walk out first), which was supposedly used by one of the governemnt officals has become a catchphrase on the Chinese web. If you're interested in hearing the song in its entirety, you can watch it right here:
Don't get me wrong, I don't think that anyone deserves a disaster "more” than others, however after such a tragedy, wouldn't you wish the Uyghurs of Xinjiang province to never ever have to experience something like this again? Well, sorry to disappoint but there have been fiery disasters in Xinjiang after 1994…. as well as before 1994. Yes, that's right, there’s actually been a similar disaster in 1977 which went into history as China's worst fire with a death toll of 694, of which about 597 were underage. I would write more about this calamity if I could, however there are practically no details I could find about this event so far and if it was exacerbated by CCP officials. But I promise, I'll keep looking.
This does beg the question though: Why aren't these desasters more well-known? Not just around the world but even within China? Based on all you have read up until this point, I'm simply going to apply Occams Razor and asume that the . Still don't believe me? Then consider this: If you visit the town of Karamay and go to the approximate location of the now demolished theatre, you won't find a single plaque or statue in remembrance of the disaster.
The courts quickly convicted 14 people for their wrongdoing, 4 of them senior officials which were punished for dereliction with prison sentences of at most 6 years. It was a quick, but mostly reactionary trial probably in order for the goverment not to lose face.
In 1995, 300 famililes of the dead and injured sent representatives to the National People’s Congress, the PRC’s national legislature and the highest organ of state power (apart from the “Supereme Leader”), but instead of their concerns and grievances being heard, they were led off by security guards to a walled government compount where five buses took them back to the airport, where they were escorted through straightaway onto a plance bound for Xinjiang.
1996
Covering up of eSpace Program Disasters
By this point you must have already noticed, that CCP officals and disasters that end up being covered up are inseparable like politics and economics. And when it comes to this space program-related catastrophy I'm about to discuss, they might actually have done a really good job at covering it up. Well, until now…
Normally, I found out about the attrocities of the PRC through articles, books and interviews. However, the first time I heard about the possibility that the PRC might have been covering up numerous space program disasters, I heard it in Nick Crow
More coming soon
1999
Persecution of Falun Dafa (aka Falun Gong)
Coming soon
2000–2009
2008
Charter ‘08
Coming soon
The totally preventable murderous winter
Coming soon
2010–2020
2016
Panama Papers a.k.a “Canal Papers”
Coming soon
2017
Konzentrationslager 2.0: “Re-education” in Xinjiang
Coming soon
2019
Hong Kong Protests: A bauhinia suffocated in tear gas
The PRC’s relation with its “special administration zone” after the handover of 1997 has been tumultuous at best. What I refer to as handover here, was the "return" but it's just interesting to note here, that the PRC was founded in 1949, almost a hundred years after the seceeding of Hong Kong island to the British Empire, and 50 years after the British Empire gained ownership of the New Territories. Why was Hong Kong given back in the first place?
Well, though Hong Kong island was technically a crown colony and part of the British empire, the New Territories were technically only temporarily given to the UK in a 99-year contract, signed by the Qing Dynasty in 1898.
By the 1980s, it the day that the UK was going to have to return the New Territories to China was noticeably looming closer and closer. For the free people of Hong Kong, this was a time of anxiety and angst. Some feared that Hong Kong, the "Pearl of the Orient" (as it was referred to at the time due to its liberal economy, relatively high status of living as well as will be repressed to become just another Chinese city and that the people will lose all the special rights they have lived under It was then decided to give up Hong Kong island as well and return the entirety of Hong Kong as a bundle. The terms and condition and obligations of the handover were negotiated and written down in the 1984 Joint Sino-British Declaration. This declaration is a UN-listed international treaty, something that will be of significance later-on.
More coming coming soon
2020
Coronavirus
While the term SARS may not mean much to msost people in the West, for the Chinese and Hong Kongers especially, SARS is still in the recent collective memory and almost every Hong Konger will have a story to tell about what they did at home while in lockdown due to SARS, the same way most Americans have a story to tell about what they did on September 11, 2001.
More coming soon
Hong Kong’s “National Security Law”
2021 (Coming in 2022)
Note from the author.
Important: This is a work-in-progress story. I’ve almost wanted to publish a long story about a (technically) still ongoing topic in numerous installments. And since it’s going to take me a lot of time to complete this story, I’ve decided to publish it as a draft which will be continually updated and improved (including my sources). As a rule of thumb, I will add an update every weekend, so feel free to bookmark this page and come back at a later time.
Please note that this is my subjective writing and not meant to be an objective, scholarly work for an academic publication.
Did I miss something? You should know that I will keep this list updated in case I missed something or more recent events happened. So if you have something to add or want to critique something, feel free to reach out or add a comment! Just keep in mind that if you have criticism concerning
Update log:
1) Week 4 November 2020: Added extensive background section (pre-1927)
2) February 2020: Added section on Great Fire of Karamy in 1994
Upcoming:
3) February 2020: Added section on HK anti-elab protests of 2019
4) February 2020: Added section on CCP from 1927–1949
Sources
Books
[1999] The Black Book of Communism by Stephane Courtois, Nicolas Werth et al. (p.459 — p.546)
[2009] Laogai: The Machinery of Repression in China by Nicole Kempton, Nan Richardson et al.
[2018] Stealth War by Robert Spalding
[2019] The Great Firewall of China by James Griffiths
[2020] Unfree Speech by Joshua Wong
[2020] Hidden Hand by Clive Hamilton & Mareiko Ohlberg
Wikipedia pages
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laogai (I don’t know why Medium doesn’t expand this Wikipedia link in particular…)
Weblinks
- New Book Uncovers Atrocities from China’s Civil War on Brandscovery
- LEARN A LITTLE ABOUT TIBET on umass.edu
- Battle of Chamdo on Alchetron
- Laogai Camps (China.) on Socialphy/icyte
- New York Times article China Orders Safety Study After Fire Kills 300 (1994)
- Reuters article China 1994 fire killed 288 pupils as officials fled-expose (2007)
- The Globe and the Mail article Officials took preferece over children in fire disaster: journalist
- The Christian Science Monitor article In China, an example of safety taking a back seat (2008)
- IOL article 74 die in Chinese cinema blaze (2000)
Sources for the pictures
- Battle at Ta-ping Gate by T.Miyano on Wikipedia
- Picture of Yuan Shikai as Emperor on The Great War Blog
- Battle of Chamdo maps and photos on War on Tibet/historicaldocs
- 44 disturbing pictures of China’s Cultural Revolution on allthingsinteresting
