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Welcome to the official home and wonderful world of Pulitzer Prize Winning Political Cartoonist Michael P. Ramirez, daily editorial cartoonist for the Las Vegas Review Journal |
The Communist Party’s ‘Other China’ keeps its people living in constant fear
BY YAQIU WANG SPECIAL TO THE LOS ANGELES TIMES OCTOBER 03, 2019 05:00 AM THE KANSAS CITY STAR On Sept. 23, the wife of 38-year-old Chinese activist Wang Meiyu learned that her husband had died in a detention center in Hunan province, less than three months after the police detained him there. Wang had staged lone protests calling for President Xi Jinping to step down and allow democracy in China. “He was a healthy, normal man when he went in there,” Wang’s widow told Radio Free Asia. “When I saw his (dead) body … he was totally unrecognizable.” Those who rely on Chinese media for their news are unlikely ever to hear about Wang’s death — or about the hundreds of thousands of other Chinese citizens who have run afoul of the government. Controlling information has always been central to Chinese Communist Party rule, and as the 70th anniversary of that rule approached on Tuesday, the propaganda machine was in overdrive. What Chinese people have been hearing are Xi’s speeches extolling the party’s achievements and interviews with people expressing their national pride. They see images of government-produced high speed trains, state of the art weaponry and high tech mega projects. “There are actually two Chinas,” Chinese scholar Qian Liqun said in a speech. “One is the China amplified by the historical narrative and propaganda machinery, a China that strides triumphantly and is unstoppable. The other is the China ravaged and denied, perishing in the darkness.” read more |
The Dave Sussman Show
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