CHICOMS AND CHAOS

It is a humbling experience to have a deep conversation with a truly great man. Harry Wu has been nominated repeatedly for the Nobel Peace Prize. He is in the same league with Andrei Sakharov, Lech Walesa, Aung San Suu Kyi, and His Holiness the Dalai Lama. It is Harry Wu who deserved the Nobel Peace Prize last year, not a racist kook, Wangari Maathai of Kenya, who believes AIDS was invented by white scientists to exterminate black Africans.

Harry was a young student in Beijing when he was arrested for criticizing the Chinese Communist Party for supporting the Soviet Union’s invasion of Hungary. The year was 1959. For these casual remarks to friends (who reported him), he was thrown into the system of slave labor camps known as the Laogai – the Chinese Gulag.

For the next 20 years, Harry was imprisoned in 12 different Laogai slave labor camps. Can you imagine being beaten, tortured and nearly starved to death for 20 years? Witnessing the deaths of many other prisoners from brutality, starvation and suicide, Harry survived.

Released in 1979, Harry went back to school, got a degree in geology, and wangled an invitation to lecture at UC Berkeley. Coming to America in 1985, he became an American citizen and founded the Laogai Research Foundation. It is through Harry’s testimony in Senate hearings, and his books — Laogai: The Chinese Gulag; Bitter Winds: A Memoir of My Years in China’s Gulag; Troublemaker: One Man’s Crusade Against China’s Cruelty (all available at Amazon ) — that the world knows of the Laogai.

In 1995, Harry went back to China bearing a US passport, attempting to document the Laogai camps and knowing he could be sent back to one of them. He was. Arrested on the transparently trumped-up charge of “stealing state secrets,” he was sentenced to 15 years in the camps. So many Senators and Congressmen pressured Clinton to demand his release that Clinton did so and Harry was expelled. Back in America, he continues unrelentingly to expose the regime of fascist gangsters that runs the Communist Government of China.

The first time I met Harry a few years ago I realized that here was a man of undiluted integrity. Unlike other Chinese “dissidents” whom I’d met who advocated freedom for Chinese only while denying it to others under Beijing’s colonial rule like the Tibetans, Harry wants real freedom for everyone in China. “The Tibetans should be free to choose their own destiny,” he told me.

When I had lunch with Harry this week, we agreed that China faces chaos – and that the Chicoms will most likely try to cure the chaos with war.

The New York Times reports (12/31/04) that there were over 60,000 – sixty thousand – riots, disturbances, and public protests throughout China in 2004. "People can see how corrupt the government is while they barely have enough to eat," a demonstration leader was quoted. "Our society has a short fuse, just waiting for a spark."

Harry and I discussed my To The Point article, China’s Three No’s (no water, no wives, no banks), focusing in particular on China’s economy and banking system. All four of China’s main banks (all state owned) have more uncollectable debts than they have assets and loans. The Shanghai Composite, China’s largest stock market, has gone nowhere for five years.

Foreign companies and investors may be pouring money into China, but Chinese companies and investors are pouring money out of China. Billions in government and private money is in capital flight and invested in “safe havens” around the world, rather than ploughed back into the Chinese economy to insure its continued growth.

2005 may well see the protest level in China escalate dramatically to perhaps an average of 8 to 10,000 riots and demonstrations a month, many of them uncontrollably violent. At the same time, the insolvency of China’s banking system will become inescapably more obvious. The Chicoms in Beijing will see no alternative to preserving their control over Chinese society other than redirecting all the riotous dissent now aimed at them towards an external enemy.

The Chicoms realize that, as everyone including themselves has lost their belief in Communism, their only way to avoid chaos and anarchy is through a frenzied Chinese nationalism. In the past, I have listed a number of possible targets of this nationalism, including Russia’s Far East which Russia stole from China in 1860. Now it is clear that the list is narrowed to one target only: Taiwan.

The Taiwanese will be portrayed as Chinese apostates, traitors to the Chinese Motherland. It will be as easy as turning on a switch for Beijing to ramp up a jingoistic fury against them. It’s the path of least resistance for the Chicoms.

A war to conquer Taiwan – which doesn’t have to entail military invasion, or even an annihilative missile attack, just enough to coerce Taiwan into surrendering its independence – would be devastating to China’s economy. But faced with the choice – Control or Chaos – Beijing’s Communist Mandarins will choose the former even at this cost.

“Chinese history is very simple,” Harry explained. “It’s one dynasty after another – really the same dynasty over and over again with different people and names. The Communist Dynasty established by Mao is no different. It’s those periods between dynasties that scares people, for those are periods of anarchy and chaos. China is heading towards one of these frightful periods now. It is coming soon.”

Thus so is war upon Taiwan. Driving the urgency is the 2008 Beijing Olympics. The Chicoms will want this war over with and the resultant economic hit taken in time for recovery and faded memories by 2008. Just like the blood of democracy protestors was washed off the stones of Tienanmen Square in June 1989 and the Chicoms insisted to the world no blood was ever spilled, they will wash away Taiwanese blood and tell the world to pretend nothing happened.

There is only one way to stop the Chicoms from attacking Taiwan: an alliance between Japan and the US determined to prevent them. There isn’t much time, for the attack has to come no later than about the middle of next year, only two years before the Olympics. That’s why one of the very first international trips of newly-confirmed Secretary of State Condi Rice will be to Tokyo. Now you know what she and Japanese Foreign Minister Nobutaka Machimura will be talking about.

In the meantime, I couldn’t encourage you more to consider supporting Harry Wu’s Laogai Research Foundation. The address to send tax deductible donations is 1925 K St., Ste 400, Washington DC 20006. I am seconding Harry’s re-nomination for the Peace Prize to the Nobel Committee, hoping its Norwegian members will show more integrity this year than they did last.