(Minghui.org) The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) announced Jiang Zemin’s death on November 30, at a time when students in China were preparing for their final exams. It’s only natural to also grade Jiang’s performance during his tenure and issue him a report card.
Just like students who are graded on different subjects, let’s look at how Jiang did in increasing the standard of living, protecting the environment, ensuring public safety, maintaining moral standards, protecting basic human rights, and developing the economy.
F in Increasing Standard of Living
Some claimed that, because of economic growth, China’s standard of living increased during Jiang’s tenure. But economic growth is not the same as improved standard of living. First of all, massive corruption ensured that only officials got wealthy, not ordinary citizens. In other words, corrupt officials essentially stole ordinary citizens’ hard-earned money. Without corruption, the general public would have seen increased income.
Secondly, according to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, an adequate standard of living also includes an individual’s social and cultural rights. In China, people have been deprived of many of these rights under the CCP’s totalitarian rule. Details will be provided in subsequent sections.
Given the above, Jiang earned an F in increasing the standard of living.
F in Protecting the Environment
Before Jiang rose to the top position of the CCP in 1989, China had clean water and clean air. The situation quickly changed after Jiang took office. An article from earth.org in June 2022 indicated “as much as 90% of the country’s groundwater is contaminated by toxic human and industrial waste dumping, as well as farm fertilizers, causing about 70% of rivers and lakes to be unsafe for human use.” Due to desertification and soil erosion caused by environment degradation, the average land per capita dropped 30% from the 1980s to 2003.
Jiang’s score on protecting the environment? Also an F.
F in Ensuring Public Safety
In ancient China, it was so safe that “If you lost something on the road, it wouldn’t be taken, and no one needed to shut their doors at night.” Things changed a lot after the CCP seized power in 1949, especially during Jiang’s era. People felt less safe and the crime rate increased sharply after 1989, according to a 2017 Asian Journal of Criminology titled “Spatio-Temporal Change of Crime at Provincial Scale in China—Since the Economic Reform.”
Another crime surge occurred in 1999 when Jiang and the CCP began to suppress Falun Gong, a peaceful meditation system based on the principles of Truthfulness-Compassion-Forbearance. A large number of practitioners have since been detained, imprisoned, and tortured for their belief. The crime of forced organ harvesting, a new form of evil on this planet according to human rights lawyers, also started shortly after the persecution began.
Jiang failed to protect citizen safety.
F in Maintaining Moral Standards
Moral values also declined dramatically after Jiang took office. “The Chinese have no moral bottom line, and anything can happen in China at any time,” according to a May 2011 article on BBC (Chinese version) titled “Let’s talk about China: Who is to blame for the loss of virtue”. The article listed examples of moral decline: “The flood of poisonous food; embezzlement and misappropriation of charitable funds and disaster relief materials; maiming children and forcing them to beg for their own profit; using mentally disabled people as miners and killing them to make fake mine disaster claims... Using your own identity to help businessmen engage in false propaganda; angels in white clothes (doctors) become devils in white clothes...”
All these stemmed from Jiang’s money-driven policies, which encouraged people to make money at all cost as he attempted to divert people’s attention from the persecution of Falun Gong and its principles of Truthfulness-Compassion-Forbearance.
It is not surprising Jiang’s grade for maintaining moral standards is an F.
F in Protecting Basic Human Rights
When it came to protecting people’s basic human rights, Jiang pushed censorship and information control to a new level with modern technologies and the Golden Shield Project led by his son Jiang Mianheng. Ordinary citizens had no clue where their tax money went, and they had no access to independent or overseas information on topics such as how the CCP was suppressing various groups, including Falun Gong practitioners, with brutality and lies and how Jiang covered up his traitorous history and gave away large areas of land to Russia. In fact, any attempts to investigate or expose such information was met with retaliation or imprisonment.
Shouldn’t Jiang get an F in this area?
F in Developing the Economy
On the topic of the economy, Jiang also failed despite some people’s claim that Jiang led the economic boom in China and was a great leader. Jiang fostered an army of corrupt officials. The general public even dubbed him “head coach of corruption.” His grandson Jiang Zhicheng, was said to have a fortune of over $ 500 billion while about 600 million Chinese citizens reported a monthly income of only about 1,000 yuan (or $144). They are facing a gloomy future because Jiang has wasted resources and polluted the environment, making economic growth unsustainable.
It is only reasonable to give Jiang an F in developing the economy.
Overall GPA
Given the above, Jiang’s GPA couldn’t be any worse. Looking at the standard of living, the environment, public safety, moral standards, basic human rights, and the economy in China today, Jiang actually plunged the country into an abyss.
I hope Jiang’s report card will help us see the CCP for what it really is and help us get back on track without it.
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Category: Perspective
