Back in 1948, Hu Shih, former Chinese Ambassador to the U.S. (1938 to 1942), faced a difficult decision.

Both the Chinese Communist Party, whose troops had surrounded Beijing, and Chiang Kai-shek promised him high-ranking positions in their respective administrations. Each did the best they could to woo the renowned scholar to their camp.

In the end, Hu boarded the plane to join Chiang in Nanjing, then-capital of the Republic of China.

Hu’s son, Sidu, however, decided to stay.

“I did not do anything against the CCP. I would be fine,” he thought.

After turning in valuables left by his father to the officials, Sidu was forced to write articles defaming his father.

He eventually collapsed and committed suicide in 1957 at age 36 after being targeted in many of the CCP’s political campaigns.

This is just one of the countless tragedies that have transpired in the past few decades.

Hoping for a better future, either for society or for themselves, some people bet their lives on the CCP only to find it a journey towards destruction.

This kind of misfortune can be found in the then-Soviet Union, throughout the CCP’s history, and in the persecution of Falun Gong today.

“Kill the Donkey Once the Millstone Is Not Needed”

Zhu Ziqing is a well-known Chinese writer whose numerous articles are still published in Chinese textbooks today. He was heavily publicized—again in textbooks—for siding with the CCP and refusing to accept food from the U.S. during China’s civil war in 1946.

What was omitted in the textbooks was that he had an ample supply of food until his death, and his son Zhu Maixian was executed at 33 in 1951 despite his allegiance to the regime.

Aside from Hu Sidu and Zhu Maixian, who joined the CCP before it took power in 1949, many active followers after that also faced similar fates.

One example was Liu Chuanxin, who became the chief of the Beijing Police Department after the Cultural Revolution started in 1966. To please higher officials, he arbitrarily listed over 1,000 officers as spies and enemies of the state.

After the Cultural Revolution ended, however, Liu was one of the first officers to be punished.

He was removed from his position as the police chief in January 1977. He committed suicide four months later.

In addition, to allay anger from the public, nearly 800 of Liu’s followers were removed from the Beijing Police Department; 17 of them were secretly executed without due process.

Their families were told that they had died in the line of duty.

After almost every political campaign, police officers would be punished as scapegoats for following orders that were no longer in vogue.

This phenomenon is often described using the Chinese proverb, xie mo sha lü (killing the donkey after the millstone is not needed).

Examples in the Soviet Union

Not everyone was misled by the Communist Party propaganda.

Back in 1923, with fervor for communism, Chiang and a group of officials visited the Soviet Union on behalf of Sun Yat-sen, the first president of the Republic of China.

This trip, however, made Chiang a strong advocate against communism.

He found that the Russian Communist Party’s revolution consisted of two components: one was class struggle, and the other was mobilizing people for armed riots.

More specifically, because the Communist Party considered class struggle as the primary force for social advance, it often intensified class struggles intentionally and created chaos via looting, rape, arson, and killing.

The public was then either enticed or coerced into participating as followers or slaves

This brutality in the Soviet Union was enforced through The People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD), followed by the Committee for State Security (KGB).

Genrikh Yagoda, director of the NKVD (1934 to 1936), followed Joseph Stalin’s orders and supervised the arrest, show trial, and execution of various political enemies.

In spite of Yagoda’s contribution to the Great Purge, Stalin issued an order for his arrest in 1937. Yagoda begged for clemency but was nonetheless executed for treason and conspiracy.

Interestingly, the rise and fall of the Soviet Union—and probably that of the CCP as well—was predicted by Georgi Plekhanov, founding father of Russian Marxism.

In 1918, less than one year after the October Revolution, Plekhanov left a political will and prohibited its revelation until the collapse of communism.

This document, “Political Will and Testament,” was later recovered in BNP Paribas and published in full by the Russian newspaper Nezavisimaya Gazeta on November 30, 1999.

Plekhanov predicted that a communist society would be operated through one-party tyranny with no democracy or freedom.

Such a society would enforce terrorism, deceit, and force before its collapse.

He also pointed out that “the greatness of a country does not lie in the vastness of its land or the richness of its history, but in its democratic traditions and standard of living. As long as its people live in poverty enjoy no democracy, it is hard to guarantee there will be no crises or eventual demise.”

Ongoing Brutality

Many of history’s lessons remain unlearned and unheard, let alone Plekhanov’s prediction.

Twenty-three years after the end of the Cultural Revolution and eight years after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, former CCP leader Jiang Zemin launched a massive campaign against a traditional Chinese meditation practice in China.

According to Minghui.org, there have been at least 2.5 to 3 million arrests of Chinese Falun Gong practitioners for their practice since the persecution started in July 1999.

Among them, over 4,300 have lost their lives due to torture in police custody. These represent only the handful of cases successfully submitted to Minghui after overcoming internet surveillance and censorship in China.

The ongoing live organ harvesting from the Chinese Falun Gong, which began in 2006 under the direct orders from the CCP, is still being performed today.

The atrocities have finally been verified in June 2019 during the Independent Tribunal headed by Sir Geoffrey Nice.

It added that followers of Falun Gong, the spiritual practice, were “certainly” among those used as a source for “forced organ harvesting” in recent decades – and there was a “risk” that Uighur Muslims have suffered similar treatment.

Its report stopped short of labeling China’s actions a genocide – noting some prisoners had been released – but claimed it was “beyond a reasonable doubt” the country was guilty of crimes against humanity.

Beijing has repeatedly denied allegations of forced organ harvesting.

Since there were about 100 million Chinese Falun Gong practitioners when the suppression started, and the majority, if not all, of them, have been discriminated against, mistreated and abused in various forms, the actual impacted population could be much higher.

The CCP degrades its own people and its members to become “pawns to be manipulated, used, and thrown away.”

We see this, for example, in the so-called “useful idiots” who help communist regimes seize power, only to themselves be marked for death under communism.

Xie mo sha lü, (killing the donkey after the millstone is not needed), is “wake up call” to the people of the world, especially for the Chinese Nation of today.