On the 70th anniversary of the Chinese Communist authorities sending troops to support the war of aggression waged by Pyongyang, Communist Party leader Xi Jinping issued a strongly worded speech glorifying the war that was identified by the United Nations and the world, and even recognized by the People’s Daily, the organ of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, as having been started by Pyongyang. But at a time when the CCP-controlled media was still vigorously promoting the spirit of anti-Americanism advocated by Xi Jinping, the CPC Central Committee held a press conference on October 30 to argue that a complete decoupling of China and the United States was unrealistic and unproductive.
CCP Propaganda vs. Historical Facts
On October 23, the CCP authorities held a congress at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the so-called Chinese People’s Volunteer Army’s fight against the United States and in aid of the DPRK abroad. To observers, the speech of Xi Jinping, General Secretary of the CPC Central Committee and President of China, at the congress appeared to be a sign of strength, but it was also a clear sign of weakness; at the same time, the Chinese authorities were poorly equipped to deal with the basic historical facts about the Korean War.
In his speech, Xi said, “On June 25, 1950, the Korean Civil War broke out. In early October 1950, despite repeated warnings from the Chinese government, U.S. forces crossed the 38th Parallel and set fire to the border between China and North Korea. The invading U.S. planes repeatedly bombarded China’s northeastern border areas, causing serious losses to people’s lives and property and posing a serious threat to China’s security.”
Some analysts have pointed out that Xi said, “On June 25, 1950, the Korean Civil War erupted,” as if the eruption of the Korean War was as much a natural disaster as the eruption of a volcano, deliberately avoiding who actually started the invasion, destroyed the peace and led to the war; this ambiguous wording highlights the fact that Xi and his propaganda team are ashamed to admit that the Chinese Communist regime’s so-called resistance to the U.S. and aid to the DPRK to defend the country is actually support for the invaders who started the war.
Analysts believe that Xi and his propaganda team are now also trying to conceal another basic timeline and historical fact, namely, that the United States acted to give military support to Taiwan only after the Kim Il Sung regime, backed by the Soviet Union and the Chinese Communist Party, launched its war of aggression, and that this support has made it difficult for the Chinese Communist regime so far to destroy the Republic of China on Taiwan by force and thereby accomplish what the Chinese Communist Party claims is the reunification of the motherland.
Analysts also point out that for decades after the Korean War, the CCP authorities kept the Chinese public in the dark, while propagating the myth that South Korea and the United States had started the war and that China had to defend its homeland against the United States and the North. With the passage of time and the declassification of secret Soviet archives, the CCP authorities stopped promoting such myths when they became unsustainable, but they also persistently refused to publicly acknowledge the basic historical fact that the Korean War that year was the result of an invasion launched by the Kim Il Sung regime and that the CCP regime supported the aggressors and paid a heavy price for it.
However, this situation changed dramatically in May 2017. At that time, the insistence of Kim Jong-un, the third-generation leader of the Kim family dynasty of North Korea, on developing weapons of mass destruction, including atomic bombs, led to tensions in Northeast Asia, which the Chinese Communist authorities considered as detrimental to Beijing’s interests and criticized the Kim Jong-un regime for doing so. Kim Jong-un’s authorities ridiculed the situation, complaining that the Chinese authorities, who had suffered huge losses as a result of the Kim dynasty’s fire, were ungrateful to Pyongyang. The People’s Daily, an organ of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, published an op-ed article counter-complaining this complaint of the Kim Jong-un authorities and, in passing, stated the basic historical facts that are internationally recognized.
“In the North Korean ideology, North Korea has maintained the security of mainland China (notably, the use of mainland China) in the front line of anti-Americanism for more than 70 years. Accordingly, it is logical that China should support and meet all North Korean demands and should ‘thank the DPRK’. This is a complete reversal of the China-North Korea relationship and even the Northeast Asian pattern. How could war have broken out on the peninsula if Kim Il Sung had not wanted to unify it? China got involved, costing hundreds of thousands of lives, triggering a 20-year-long confrontation between China and the United States, and even leaving the cross-strait issue on hold to this day, with China bearing most of the cost of North Korea’s ‘capriciousness’ and recklessness back then.”
The “peninsula” referred to here in the People’s Daily article signed by Chivalrous Island is the Korean Peninsula, and the “two sides of the Taiwan Strait” is the two sides of the Taiwan Strait.
Is Xi Jinping showing strength or weakness?
Xi Jinping said in his speech at the Great Hall of the People that “the world is a world of peoples, and the difficulties and challenges facing the world require people of all countries to help each other in the same boat and join hands to tackle them. In today’s world, unilateralism, protectionism and extreme self-interest are simply not feasible. Any blackmail, blockade, extreme pressure will simply not work! Any act of doing things one’s own way, any act of domination, hegemony, bullying, will simply not work! Not only does it not work at all, it’s bound to end up dead in the end!”
The passage, clearly aimed at the United States, was seen by many commentators as a rare example of toughness. But to New York-based scholar and commentator Hu Ping, Xi’s words were actually a comical and clear demonstration of the weakness of Xi Jinping and the Chinese authorities.
The funny thing is that Xi is using seemingly strong language to make a request or even a plea to the United States, because Xi’s words “against protectionism, unilateralism, against blackmail, against the embargo” clearly refer to the U.S. view that the Chinese authorities have for years refused to fulfill the commitments made when joining the World Trade Organization, insisting on unfair trade policies and practices, the U.S. Trump administration to take countermeasures against China, not to say at the expense of economic and trade decoupling with China.
Hu Ping said, “If you want to say the U.S. is going to force buy and sell, it’s kind of plausible to say it’s U.S. bullying and bullying. Now the U.S. is going to be the opposite of strong buying and selling, it doesn’t buy your stuff, it doesn’t sell you stuff, it doesn’t play with you anymore. How can you call it bullying and overbearing when it doesn’t play with you anymore? It’s ridiculous. That’s what the CCP is most worried about right now. The CCP would just love to see the kind of economic and trade exchanges between China and the U.S. continue and develop over the last few decades, because the CCP has gotten many, many good things from such exchanges in the past. It fears that this good thing will come to an end from now on.”
Hu Ping went on to say that on the issue of policy and propaganda towards the US, the CCP authorities, led by Xi Jinping, have now long since entered a state of incoherence; previously the CCP authorities claimed that a trade war between the US and China would never end well and that it must be a cliffhanger, and also that a trade war between the US and China is lifting a stone to smash its own feet, with many Chinese netizens ridiculing the idea that why not let the US smash its own feet properly? Why stop the American Empire from falling off a cliff and dying? The Chinese authorities were previously speechless at such ridicule; now they are apparently unable to deal with Chinese netizens questioning why they are trying to stop the U.S. empire from shooting itself in the foot.
Hu Ping said: “Look at his recent vigorous buying of US agricultural products, making gestures to honor the first phase of the US-China trade agreement, saying, ‘We’re still good trading partners. Why don’t we play along? We’re having a good time.’ He just wants to pull this off, to make that stand. But this cannot be said in a soft gesture, not in a friendly gesture, but in an aggressive and tough tone.”
At a time when the Chinese media under Communist Party control is still vigorously showing the world what Hu Ping calls Xi’s aggressive and tough tone, the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China (CPC) held a press conference on Oct. 30 to show the world a very different tone from the Chinese authorities controlled by Xi Jinping. Han Wenxiu, deputy director of the Office of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China’s Financial and Economic Commission in charge of day-to-day work, said at the conference, “As the two largest economies in the world, China and the United States, the economic ties between the two countries are determined by the complementary nature of their economic structures and the openness of the global economy, and complete decoupling is simply unrealistic and unproductive.”
What exactly is Xi Jinping’s speech signaling?
Some analysts have pointed out that the truth of the Korean War has long been known to the international community, and that the so-called war of resistance against the United States and aid to the DPRK to defend the country was in fact an unjust war of support for the aggressors, for which the Chinese Communist authorities paid “most of the cost” and the Chinese people and Chinese soldiers paid a heavy price, a fact that the People’s Daily, an organ of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, has openly acknowledged.
Under such circumstances, Xi Jinping made a speech on the 70th anniversary of the Chinese Communist Party’s dispatch of troops to North Korea, saying, “The Chinese people are neither afraid of trouble nor provoked by it, and in the face of any difficulties and risks, their legs and bellies will not tremble and their waists will not bend. Regardless of the development of the times, we must gather the national strength of all people with one heart and one mind. During the war against the United States and in aid of the DPRK, the Chinese people, inspired by the banner of patriotism, joined together to avenge their enemies and work with one heart, letting the world witness the magnificent power embedded in the Chinese people and letting the world know that ‘the Chinese people are now organized and cannot be messed with. If they are provoked, it is not good enough!'”
The New York Times Chinese website published a report on October 26 on this, with the headline “Xi Jinping’s High-Profile Commemoration of Anti-U.S. Aid to North Korea Sends Stronger Signal to U.S.”.
According to Chinese human rights and democracy activist Wei Jingsheng, Xi Jinping’s seemingly brave and fierce speech against the U.S. is not actually speaking harshly to the U.S.; there are many more convenient channels for him to speak harshly to the U.S. He is saying these brave and fierce words out of domestic political calculation because the Xi Jinping administration has been promoting fanatical nationalism, and many supporters of the Communist regime or agents of the Communist Party’s online public opinion have appeared on the Chinese Internet under the control of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to vocalize their intention to attack Taiwan and achieve the CCP’s so-called reunification of the motherland by force.
Wei Jingsheng said, “Recently, when some people are really discussing whether to attack Taiwan, many experts, including many so-called hawkish experts have come out to say that they can’t hit Taiwan, and that it’s not the right time to fight with the United States, and certainly there is no chance of winning a war with the United States. In this case, I think Xi Jinping deliberately wanted to mention that the US is not a myth in order to suppress this so-called ‘defeatist’ public opinion in the country. You notice the CCP propaganda department they themselves published Xi Jinping’s speech, their own headline is (the Korean War) broke the myth of US invincibility, meaning: look, we can still win a fight with the US.”
In Wei Jingsheng’s view, Xi now relies heavily on fervent nationalism to gain cohesion for his personal dictatorship, which is now mired in an internal and external crisis and in desperate need of a confidence boost.
Critics of the Chinese Communist regime believe that Xi Jinping’s internal and diplomatic crisis is manifested in his lack of knowledge and blind command of the economy since he came to power, his backtracking, his attempts to reintroduce total control of the economy, and his efforts to expand and strengthen the Communist Party’s state-owned enterprises, resulting in the withering of the economy; and his political dictatorship and suppression of public opinion, which has led to the outbreak of a new type of coronavirus epidemic in China, causing a catastrophe for China and the rest of the world, making the Chinese Communist regime a target of the international community.
For New York-based scholar and commentator Hu Ping, Xi’s words and actions can only be understood in terms of his personal ideological logic. After the death of Mao Zedong and the Communist Party’s so-called policy of reform and opening-up, Hu says, there were often two sets of discourses on many important issues inside and outside the Chinese system and even within the Communist Party. One set is some of the more open and enlightened discourses that have existed since the CCP’s policy of reform and opening up in the late 1970s. The other set is the rigid and unrepentant Maoist discourse of the past that some insist on.
For example, there are two sets of discourses within the CCP on how to evaluate the Mao era. Those who hold to the attitude of reform and opening up have a more negative view of the Maoist era. The other set of discourse is what Xi Jinping has been saying since he came to power, which is not to negate the first three decades with the thirty years after the reform and opening-up. The Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, which caused a catastrophe in China, have become the “arduous exploration” that Xi Jinping’s administration talks about.
In Hu’s view, there are also two distinctly different discourses within China and the CCP on the issue of the so-called “war of resistance against the US and aid to the DPRK”. In his opinion, anyone with a bit of brains now knows that the war was a big mistake, even from the CCP’s own point of view; as for the truth of the war, everyone already knows it; when these two sets of words coexist, there is no doubt which one Xi Jinping, who aspires to be Mao Zedong II, will choose.
Hu Ping said, “On all such issues, Xi Jinping has always steadfastly sided with the most conservative and rigid discourse. He is always this way. That’s why I don’t find it surprising that he made the so-called 70th anniversary speech of the ‘anti-American aid to North Korea’. He is the only one who would do so. Whenever there are two different versions of a major issue in the CCP today, he must be on the side of the worst, most contradictory, and most obviously a lie, because that is more indicative of the kind of tough posture of the ideology of the past.”
The unpleasant Korean War.
Xi Jinping said in a speech delivered in Beijing on October 23, “The great war against the United States and the DPRK resisted imperialist aggression and expansion, defended the security of the new China, safeguarded the peaceful life of the Chinese people, stabilized the situation on the Korean Peninsula, and maintained peace in Asia and the world. The great victory in the war of resistance against the United States and aid to the DPRK will forever be engraved in the history of the Chinese nation. Forever engraved in the history of peace, development and progress of mankind!”
However, observers and historians say that the Korean War, which Kim Il Sung secretly planned and waged with Stalin, the former leader of the Soviet Communist authorities, seventy years ago, was unbearable for all parties.
Mao Zedong, the Communist leader at the time, was completely kept in the dark by Moscow and Pyongyang. Shen Zhihua, a Chinese researcher on the history of the Cold War, came to the conclusion that “the Soviet Union was involved in all the planning, preparation and execution of the military operation to attack South Korea…. However, Mao Zedong had no knowledge of the preparatory process or specific plans for the war. Perhaps in view of the fact that China was intensifying its preparations for an attack on Taiwan, or perhaps in anticipation that the United States would not intervene and thus did not need or want China’s involvement, Stalin and Kim Il Sung, in short, kept information and intelligence from China. As a former senior North Korean military officer recalled, before the outbreak of war, all Soviet-assisted weapons arrived in North Korea by sea, not by Chinese railways, in order to keep China unaware of North Korean preparations. So much so that the first news of the outbreak of the Korean War came to Mao Zedong from a foreign newspaper. Only on the third day after the outbreak of war did Kim Il Sung send a colonel to Beijing to report on the situation. Mao was very unhappy about this, and afterwards told (his Russian translator) Shi Chul, ‘They are our close neighbors, and they did not consult with us even when war broke out, but now they come to greet us.'”
Stalin, Kim Il Sung and Mao’s conspiracy to wage the war and support the invasion led to serious consequences, which, in the words of the American history website (history.com), resulted in the deaths of nearly 5 million people on the Korean peninsula, more than half of them civilians, a figure that is about one-tenth of the pre-war population of the Korean peninsula. This rate of civilian casualties surpassed World War II and surpassed the Vietnam War. Nearly 40,000 Americans died fighting in the war, and more than 100,000 were wounded.
China has been evasive about what it calls volunteer casualties for decades, first saying nearly 150,000 died, then saying nearly 200,000. The People’s Daily’s Chivalrous Island put forward another vague claim of “hundreds of thousands of people”. Western sources put 400,000 dead and nearly 486,000 wounded on the Chinese side.
Observers suggest that after the war ended, tens of thousands of Chinese soldiers captured in the war were subjected to decades of discrimination and persecution upon their return, living in poverty and fear, and that their only crime was that they did not die in Korea. Six years after his return to China, Peng De, the commander and political commissar of the Chinese People’s Volunteer Army, was branded a rebel and persecuted to death, after being repeatedly targeted during Mao Zedong’s “Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution”.
On the Korean Peninsula, the war led to the separation of tens of thousands of families. The Kim family dynasty regime in Korea held the separated families hostage and used the gatherings of relatives of the separated families as a bargaining chip to repeatedly extort aid from the South Korean Government.
At the same time, despite the Chinese authorities’ claims that the so-called war against the U.S. and for the DPRK forged a “fighting friendship with blood,” analysts generally point out that the Communist regime suffered huge losses for the Kim family dynasty regime in Pyongyang, which has been one of the most hostile regimes to Beijing for more than 60 years and even openly threatened and blackmailed Beijing in 2017, claiming that China had breached “the limit of North Korea’s patience” and demanding that it “make the right choice” or “consider the serious consequences.
After the war, the Kim family rulers ruthlessly purged the DPRK of suspected “pro-China” factions on several occasions. On December 8, 2013, Jang Seong-taek, Kim Jong-un’s aunt and a top official of the Workers’ Party of Korea (WPK), was arrested on the spot at a meeting of the expanded Politburo of the WPK Central Committee and executed four days later on charges of being a “vicious political ambitious, conspiratorial, and dog-like”. Scum of the earth, enemy of the party and the revolution, enemy of the people, vicious traitor to the country, the world’s number one ancient traitor and traitor to the country.” Kim Jong-un’s authorities accuse Jang Sung-taek of selling North Korean interests to China.
What Xi Jinping’s discourse will do.
In this situation, what will be the effect of Xi Jinping’s speech on the occasion of the 70th anniversary of the Chinese authorities sending troops to North Korea to support the Korean War waged by the Kim family?
According to Wei Jingsheng, a human rights and democracy activist in China, “The fifty mao, the spotters, the so-called patriotic cynics, they may be greatly encouraged. They can immediately say, look, Xi is all on our side, Xi has a point, and this kind of public opinion will come out, and it will have some effect. But for ordinary people and those Communists who have a little bit more brains, this won’t have much effect. I don’t think they’re that easy to continue to be fooled.”
Hu Ping said Xi is afraid he has no time now to consider the possible practical effects of his preaching of the Korean War hoax, as he must be consistent in the Maoist posture he has maintained since taking office.
Of all the two narratives in the Communist Party, he must have chosen the worst one, simply because it seemed tougher from an ideological point of view,” Hu said. Therefore, on the Korean War issue, he could not have taken the other side of the argument. He must maintain his consistency on this point. Because the moment he shows that he appears to be inconsistent and appears to be adopting a more enlightened narrative, it will have bottom-line consequences for his entire position. In other words, now that he’s on this path, it will be difficult for him to step back and make another turn.”
To observers, after Xi’s tough-talking and worded speech commemorating the so-called war against the U.S. and North Korea, the CPC Central Committee held a press conference on October 30 to assert that a complete decoupling of China and the U.S. was unrealistic and unproductive, a clear attempt to turn the corner for or on Xi’s behalf on the issue of U.S.-China relations.
In the space of a week, Xi and the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee, which he controls, have displayed what appear to the outside world to be contrasting attitudes on how they view the United States, a situation that has led not only to confusion among the Chinese public but also to confusion among the CPC’s opinion-regulating authorities.
After the official Chinese publication of a CCP Central Committee press conference asserting that the U.S. should not decouple from China, one Chinese netizen commented, “So it’s sort of communicated internally?” Another Chinese netizen commented, “The defectorists were defeated?”
Anyone who knows the history of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and modern Chinese history knows that the latter Chinese netizen’s term “detachment” is a double entendre. In the early 1950s, while the so-called “Anti-American War” was still going on, the CCP ruthlessly attacked the “Trotskyists” (short for “Trotskyists”) within its own party. Thousands of “Trotskyists” were purged, and some were imprisoned for more than 20 years.
Chinese netizens found that passages from Xi’s own anti-U.S.-AID speech were blocked from the eyes of the Communist Party’s public opinion and propaganda department under his leadership after the Chinese government published a press release from the Communist Party Central Committee stating that China and the United States should not be decoupled.
The paragraphs of Xi’s speech that were blocked included the following: “Comrades, friends! Over the past 60 years since the victory of the Anti-American War, under the strong leadership of the Communist Party of China, China has undergone unprecedented historical changes, socialism with Chinese characteristics has entered a new era, and the Chinese nation has made a great leap from standing up and becoming rich to becoming strong.”
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