Special Series Ep.5: Exporting Revolution Pt.1 | How the Specter of Communism Is Ruling Our World

The communist cults spread across the world is powered by violence and deception. When communism is exported from a powerful country to a weaker one, violence is the quickest and most effective route. The failure of the free world to recognize the cultish character of communism leads it to take lightly the export of communist ideology. This chapter will focus on the expansion and infiltration of communist ideology in Asia, Africa, South America, and Eastern Europe. 1. Exporting Revolution to Asia The Soviet Union's export of revolution was the real reason the Chinese Communist Party, or CCP, was able to seize power. In 1919, the Soviet Union established the Third Communist International, which aimed to export revolution around the world. In April 1920, Grigory Voitinsky, the representative of the Third Communist International, traveled to China. In May, an office was set up in Shanghai to make preparations for the formation of the CCP. Over the next 30 years, the CCP was merely an organ of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and Mao Zedong received a monthly stipend of 160 to 170 yuan from the Russians. The average monthly salary of a worker in Shanghai at that time was around 20 yuan. The CCP's seizure of power was in part connected with the Communist Party's infiltration of the United States. This is one of the reasons U.S. President Harry S. Truman cut off support to Chiang Kai-shek while the Soviets continued to support the CCP. Truman also made the decision to exit Asia after World War II. In 1948, the U.S. Army left South Korea. And on January 5, 1950, Truman announced that the United States would no longer interfere in the affairs of Asia. This included the termination of military assistance to Chiang Kai-shek's Taiwan, including in the case of a war between the People's Republic of China and the Republic of China. A week later, U.S. Secretary of State Dean Acheson reiterated Truman's policy and said that if war were to break out on the Korean Peninsula, the United States would not get involved. These anti-intervention policies provided an opportunity for the Communist Party to expand its influence in Asia. When North Korea invaded the South and the United Nations sent troops, the United States changed its policy. The CCP went all out in trying to export revolution in addition to training guerrilla fighters in different countries, providing weapons, and sending troops to fight against legitimate governments. It also provided significant financial support for insurrections. During the heat of the Great Cultural Revolution in 1973, the CCP's foreign aid spending reached its peak, 7% of the national fiscal expenditure. According to Chen Yaping, a Chinese scholar with access to secret documents released by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, quote, 10,000 tons of rice were shipped to Guinea and 15,000 tons of wheat were sent to Albania in 1960. From 1950 to the end of 1964, the total foreign aid expenditure was 10.8 billion yuan, during which time the most expenditure was from 1960 to 1964 when the Great Famine was going on in China. During the famine from 1958 to 1962, tens of millions died of hunger, yet foreign aid expenditures totaled 2.36 billion yuan. If these expenditures had been used to purchase food, it would have saved 30 million people. All those people died because of the CCP's great leap forward movement, and they were simultaneously victims of the CCP's Communism seeks to conquer the world in order to destroy mankind. It exploits the human hunger for fame and fortune to mislead people into spreading its evil ideology. Stalin, Mao, Kim Il-sung, and Ho Chi Minh were driven by such desires. At a meeting with Stalin in 1949, Mao promised to send over a million troops and over 10 million workers to help Stalin's expansion into Europe in exchange for Mao's control over North Korea. On June 25, 1950, after extensive planning, North Korea invaded the South, and in three days, Seoul was taken. After a month and a half, the entire Korean Peninsula was occupied by the North. Before the war broke out, in March 1950, Mao amassed a large number of troops near the Korean border to have them ready for war. The details of the war itself are beyond the scope of this chapter, but in short, the war stretched on because of Truman's policy of appeasement. The CCP sent a, quote, volunteer army to the peninsula with another secret agenda to get rid of the more than one million Kuomintang soldiers who had surrendered during the Civil War. By the end of the Korean War, casualties on the Chinese side were over a million. The outcome of the Korean War was a split peninsula. Since the CCP and the Soviet Communist Party fought for control of North Korea, the North benefited from both sides. For example, in 1966, when Kim Il-sung visited China, he discovered that a subway was under construction in Beijing. He then requested that an identical subway be constructed in Pyongyang for free. Mao immediately decided to halt the construction in Beijing and sent equipment and personnel, including two divisions of the PLA's railway corps and numerous engineers, totaling several tens of thousands of people, to Pyongyang. The North didn't spend a penny or use any of its own people in the construction, yet demanded that the CCP guarantee the safety of the subway in times of war. In the end, Pyongyang's subway system became one of the deepest in the world at the time, with an average depth of 90 meters, 295 feet, and a maximum depth of 150 meters, 492 feet underground. After the construction was completed, Kim Il-sung told the public that it had been designed and built by Koreans. Moreover, Kim often bypassed the CCP and went directly to the Soviet Union for money and material. After the Korean War, the CCP deliberately left some people in North Korea with the mission of bringing the North closer to Beijing and prying it away from Moscow. Kim either killed or jailed the CCP personnel, and the CCP ended up losing on all fronts. After the collapse of the Soviet Communist Party, the CCP decreased its aid to North Korea. In the 1990s, the North Korean people were starving. In 2007, the Non-Governmental Organization Association of North Korean Defectors reported that in the 60 years of Kim's rule, at least 3.5 million died of hunger and related diseases. This is another bloody death of the Communist exported revolution. B. The Vietnam War Before the Vietnam War, the CCP supported the Communist Party of Vietnam, CPV, to defeat France in 1954, resulting in the 1954 Geneva Conference and the confrontation between North and South Vietnam. Later, France retreated from Vietnam. The invasion of North Vietnam into the South and the intervention of the United States made the Vietnam War more intense. It became the largest war in a single theater after World War II. The U.S. military participated in the war from 1964 to 1973. As early as 1952, Mao sent advisory groups to the CPV. The head of the military advisory group was General Wei Guoqing of the People's Liberation Army. The Land Reform Advisory Group, dispatched by the CCP, detained and executed tens of thousands of landlords and rich peasants in Vietnam, triggering famine and peasant riots in the North. The CCP and the CPV together suppressed these uprisings and launched rectification movements of the party and army. In order to become the leader of communism in Asia, Mao aided Vietnam on a large scale, despite the fact that tens of millions of people were starving to death in China. In 1962, Liu Xiaoqi, vice chairman of the CCP, ended Mao's frenzied policy at the 7,000 People's Assembly, preparing to restore the economy to health and effectively marginalize Mao. But Mao refused to give up power, so he brazenly made China enter the Vietnam War, while Liu, who had no power base in the military, had to sideline his plans for economic recovery. In 1963, Mao dispatched Luo Ruiqin and Lin Biao to Vietnam in succession. Liu promised Ho Chi Minh that the CCP would shoulder the cost of the Vietnam War itself. He said, quote, you can take China as your home front if there's a war. With the investigation and support of the CCP, in July 1964, the CPV attacked a US warship with torpedoes in the Gulf of Tonkin, creating the Gulf of Tonkin incident which triggered the United States' participation in the war. Subsequently, in order to compete with the Soviet Union for influence over Vietnam, the CCP spent treasure, weapons, and blood. Historian Chen Shenwei wrote in his book The Truth of the Revolution, the 20th Century Chronicle of China, quote, Mao's support for Vietnam brought disaster. It caused the death of 5 million civilians, led to landmines and ruin everywhere, and caused the economy to collapse. The support the CCP provided the CPV included the following, weapons, ammunition, and other military supplies sufficient to equip more than 2 million soldiers in the Army, Navy, and Air Force, more than 100 production companies and repair factories, over 300 million meters of cloth, over 30,000 cars, hundreds of kilometers of railroads, over 5 million tons of food, over 2 million tons of gasoline, over 3,000 kilometers of oil pipelines, hundreds of millions of US dollars. Apart from these goods and money supplies, the CCP also secretly dispatched over 300,000 PLA troops who then donned North Vietnamese fatigues to fight against the South Vietnamese and US militaries. To ensure the secret was kept, numerous Chinese soldiers who died in the war were buried in Vietnam. By 1978, the CCP's total aid to Vietnam reached 20 billion, while China's GDP in 1965 was only 70.4 billion yuan, approximately 28.6 billion at the official exchange rate at the time. In 1973, the United States compromised with the domestic anti-war movement, which was actually instigated by communists and with Jewish troops from Vietnam. On April 30, 1975, North Vietnam occupied Saigon and took South Vietnam. Under the direction of the CCP, the CPV began suppressions similar to the CCP's campaign to suppress counter-revolutionaries. More than 2 million people in South Vietnam risked death to flee the country, becoming the largest refugee wave in Asia during the Cold War. In 1976, the whole of Vietnam fell to communism. C. The Khmer Rouge The CPV asked the CCP to provide large-scale assistance to Vietnam during the Vietnam War, but this later became one of the reasons China and Vietnam became hostile to each other. In order to export revolution, the CCP loaded Vietnam with huge amounts of aid in order to have it keep fighting the United States. Vietnam didn't want the war to drag out so long, so it joined the U.S.-led Four-Nation Talks, which excluded China from 1969. In the 1970s, after the Lin Biao incident, Mao urgently needed to establish prestige in China. In addition, Sino-Soviet relations had worsened after the Shenbao Island incident, a locally contained military conflict between the two powers. Mao thus cooperated with the United States to counteract the Soviet Union and invited U.S. President Richard Nixon to visit China. Meanwhile, facing opposition to the Vietnam War back home, the United States was reluctant to continue fighting. Vietnam and the United States signed a peace agreement. It was then that Vietnam drifted away from the CCP and came into the orbit of the Soviet Union. Mao was unhappy with this and decided to use Cambodia to put pressure on Vietnam. Relations between Vietnam and Cambodia became worse, and the two countries eventually went to war. The CCP's support for the Communist Party of Kampuchea, broadly known as the Khmer Rouge, began in 1955, with Khmer leaders receiving training in China. Paul Pot, the paramount leader of the Khmer Rouge regime, was appointed by Mao in 1965. Mao provided money and arms to the Khmer and, in 1970 alone, provided Paul Pot with weapons and equipment for 30,000 people. After the United States withdrew from French Indochina, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, the local governments were unable to resist the CCP-supported communists, and so the Laotian and Cambodian regimes fell into their hands in 1975. Laos fell to Vietnam while Cambodia came under the control of the CCP-backed Khmer Rouge. To implement the CCP's policy and teach Vietnam a lesson, the Khmer Rouge repeatedly invaded southern Vietnam, which had been united by the CPV in 1975. It slaughtered residents at the Cambodian-Vietnamese border and tried to occupy the Mekong Delta in Vietnam. Meanwhile, Vietnam's relationship with the CCP was bad, while its relationship with the Soviet Union was good. With the support of the Soviets, Vietnam began attacking Cambodia in December 1978. After Paul Pot seized power, he ruled with extreme terror. He announced the abolition of currency, ordered all urban residents to join collective forced labor squads in the countryside, and slaughtered intellectuals. In little more than three years, more than a quarter of the country's population had been killed or had died from unnatural causes. Nevertheless, Paul Pot was promoted by CCP leaders Zhang Xunzhao and Deng Yingzhao. After the war between Vietnam and Cambodia began, the Cambodian people began to support the Vietnamese army. In just one month, the Khmer Rouge collapsed, lost the capital, Phnom Penh, and was forced to flee into the mountains and fight as guerrillas. In 1997, Paul Pot's erratic behavior caused quarrels within his own camp. He was arrested by Khmer commander Ta Mok and, in a public trial, was sentenced to life imprisonment. In 1998, he died from a heart attack. In 2014, despite the CCP's repeated attempts at obstruction, the extraordinary chambers in the courts of Cambodia sentenced two Khmer leaders, Chieu Son Phan and Nguyen Chia, to life imprisonment. Vietnam's war in Cambodia infuriated Deng Xiaoping. For this and other reasons, Deng set off a war against Vietnam in 1979, calling it a counterattack for self-defense. d. Other Parts of Asia The CCP's export of revolution had painful repercussions for the Chinese diaspora. Numerous anti-Chinese incidents broke out around the world, and at least several hundred thousand overseas Chinese were murdered. Many also had their right to do business and receive an education restricted. One typical example was in Indonesia. During the 1950s and 1960s, the CCP provided significant financial and military support to Indonesia to prop up the Communist Party of Indonesia, Partai Komunis Indonesia, or PKI. The PKI was the largest political group at the time, with 3 million direct members. Added to that, its affiliated organizations brought the combined total affiliates and members to 22 million, scattered across Indonesia's government, political system, and military, including many close to the first Indonesian president, Sukarno. Mao was criticizing the Soviet Union at the time for supporting revisionism and strongly encouraged the PKI to take the path of violent revolution. PKI leader Adit was an admirer of Mao and was preparing to stage a military coup. On September 30, 1965, right-wing military leader Suharto crushed this attempted coup, cut ties with China, and purged a large number of PKI members. The cause of this purge is related to Zhou Enlai. During one of the international meetings between the communist countries, Zhou promised the Soviet Union and representatives of other communist countries, quote, there are so many overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia, the Chinese government has the ability to export communism through these overseas Chinese and make Southeast Asia change color overnight. From this point on, large-scale anti-Chinese movements began in Indonesia. The anti-Chinese movement in Burma, also known as Myanmar, was similar. In 1967, soon after the start of the Cultural Revolution, the Chinese consulate in Burma, as well as the local branch of the Xinhua News Agency, began heavily promoting the Cultural Revolution among overseas Chinese, encouraging students to wear Mao badges, study his little red book, and confront the Burmese government. The military junta, under the rule of General Nguyen, gave orders to outlaw the wearing of badges with Mao's image and the study of Mao's writing, and to shut down Chinese schools. On June 26, 1967, a violent anti-Chinese incident took place in the capital Yangon, where dozens were beaten to death and hundreds injured. In July 1967, the CCP's official media called for, quote, firmly supporting the people of Myanmar under the leadership of the Communist Party of Burma, CPB, to start armed conflicts and start a major revolt against the Nguyen government. Soon after, the CCP sent out a military council team to assist the CPB, along with over 200 active soldiers to join them. They also ordered large groups of CPB members, who had lived in China for many years, to return to Burma and join the struggle. Afterward, a large number of Chinese Red Guards and CPB forces attacked Burma from Yunnan, defeating the Burmese government forces and taking control of the Kokang region. More than 1,000 Chinese youth sent from Yunnan died on the battlefield. About the time of the Cultural Revolution, the CCP's attempts at exporting revolution involved the promotion of violence and the provision of military training, weapons, and funding. When the CCP stopped trying to export revolution, Communist parties in various countries all disintegrated and were unable to recover. The Malaysian Communist Party was a typical case. In 1961, the Malaysian Communist Party, MCP, decided to abandon armed conflict and instead gain political power through legal elections. Deng Xiaoping called MCP leaders Chin Pung and others to Beijing, demanding that they continue their efforts at violent insurrection. Because at the time, the CCP believed that a revolutionary high tide centered around the Vietnamese battlefield would soon sweep Southeast Asia. The MCP thus continued its armed struggle and attempted revolutions for another 20 years. The CCP funded the MCP, having them procure arms on the black market in Thailand, and in January 1969, established the Malaysian Sound of Revolution radio station in Yiyang City, Hunan Province, to broadcast in Malaysian, Thai, English, and other languages. After the Cultural Revolution, during a meeting between Singapore's President Lee Kuan Yew and Deng Xiaoping, Lee requested that Deng stop the radio broadcasts of the MCP and the Communist Party of Indonesia into China. At the time, the CCP was surrounded by enemies and isolated, and Deng had just regained power and required international support, so he accepted the recommendation. Deng met with MCP leader Chin Pung and set a deadline to shut down the broadcasts agitating for communist revolution. In addition to the countries noted above, the CCP also attempted to export the revolution to the Philippines, Nepal, India, Sri Lanka, Japan, and elsewhere, in some cases providing military training, and in some cases spreading propaganda. Some of these communist organizations later became internationally acknowledged terrorist groups. For example, the Japanese Red Army, which became notorious for its anti-monarchist and pro-violence revolutionary slogans, was responsible for a plane hijacking, the massacre of civilians at an airport, and a range of other terrorist incidents.