9. Inside the World’s Biggest Prison with Yahoo! the Stool Pigeon and Comrade Orwell
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
—First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution
No one should ever confuse James Madison and Mao Zedong. Of these two “founding fathers,” Mao laid the cornerstone for what has become the world’s biggest police state and prison. In contrast, by introducing the Bill of Rights to the United States Constitution, James Madison helped guarantee every right and freedom now regularly and ruthlessly denied to the Chinese people.
Regrettably, many Americans take so many of their rights and freedoms for granted that it is almost impossible for U.S. citizens to fathom the level of repression the Chinese people must endure. Yet consider what it would be like to live in an America that operated under the same totalitarian rules as today’s China. There would be
No synagogue services on Friday nights or church on Sundays, and certainly no sermons from Billy Graham or “I Have a Dream” speeches from the likes of the late Martin Luther King Jr.
No secret ballot voting for U.S. presidents on the first Tuesdays of November every four years—or openly complaining about the outcome on Wednesdays.
No Fox News on the right, no New York Times on the left, and no toppling of any presidents by Woodward and Bernstein and the Washington Post.
No hardball with Chris Mathews, softball with Tim Russert, or political satire from Jay Leno, David Letterman, or Jon Stewart.
No consumer advocates like Ralph Nader to make our cars safer or “inconvenient truths” from environmentalists like Al Gore.
No Erin Brockovich to crack down on corporate polluters, no Julia Roberts to play her in the movie, and no Mike Wallace and 60 Minutes to crack down on everybody.
And certainly no Betty Friedan or a women’s movement.
Instead, in a Chinese version of today’s America, each of these American politicians, personalities, pundits, and public advocates would long ago have rotted away in “reeducation through labor” prison camps, been beaten into submission, taken a bullet to the back of the head, or simply disappeared. This chapter explains exactly why this is so and what it is really like to live behind China’s bamboo curtain. It is a chapter that should open the eyes of anyone who still harbors any democratic illusions about life in today’s totally totalitarian China. It is also a chapter that illustrates in graphic detail what the ultimate political stakes might be if America and the rest of the world were ultimately to lose The Coming China Wars.