By Jose Nunes, First Place Winner of our 2023 Human Rights Essay Contest
In his autobiography, Treasure in Clay, Archbishop Fulton Sheen describes the captivating faith
of a Chinese girl around the time of the Maiost Revolution in 1949.
After a priest started saying Mass, Communists soldiers stormed into his church, grabbed and put
him under house arrest in an adjoining room. They also opened the tabernacle, threw the
consecrated Hosts on the floor, and robbed the Sacred Vessels.
As the priest began to pray in atonement for these sacrilegious acts, he witnessed the courage of
a girl who would sneak into the church every day at 3 am to take communion by pressing her
tongue against the Holy Host laying on the floor. She would continue to do so for about 30 days
taking one Host a day. Finally, when there was only one left, she went to the church as usual and
took it. Unwillingly, she was seen by a Communist soldier who immediately shot and killed her.
This girl came to be called “Little Li”; her story illustrates the evil of communism and provides
an inspirational model of how to stand against it.
A seminal event in the history of the communist movement was the publication of The
Communist Manifesto, by Karl Marx in 1848. Since then, communism has spread worldwide
accumulating failures to promote human flourishing. Nevertheless, communism still captivates
the minds of many academics, journalists, and politicians such as the Canadian Prime Minister
Justin Trudeau who declared his admiration for the Chinese Communist Party in 2013.
According to the Merriam Webster dictionary, a “computer virus” is a computer program that is
usually disguised as an innocuous program or file, that often produces copies of itself and inserts
them into other programs, and that when run usually performs a malicious action; likewise,
communism shares many of these traits.
First, communism has always presented itself as a benignant system to liberate the oppressed.
Communist mottos like “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need” or
“production for use, not profit” seduced the hearts of many seeking a more just society.
Second, communism has also mutated into multiple variants in the 20th century. The Soviet
variant was born in 1917, followed by the Maoist one in 1949 and accompanied by others in
North Korea, Cuba, and Camboja. Moreover, other less apparent variants also spread via the
works of the Frankfurt School and Liberation Theology.
Finally, communism continues to damage the lives of countless people, particularly in China.
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In 1949, the Chinese Communist Party led by Mao Tse Tung ascended into power and began
implementing a series of totalitarian measures including the Anti-Rightist Campaign (1957), the
Great Leap Forward (1958), and the Cultural Revolution (1966 to 1976). Although no conclusive
number on the people assassinated during Mao’s regime was ever reached, the estimates vary
from 40 to 100 million people!
Despite the atrocities committed by Mao, the CCP introduced in 1979 under the leadership of
Deng Xiaoping a policy which would victimize the innocent lives of millions of babies and
parents for over 40 years: the one-child policy.
The one-child policy consisted of a series of population control policies undertaken by the CCP
which resulted in numerous forced abortions, sterilizations, and catastrophic demographic
changes denounced by the human rights lawyer Chen Guancheng in his book The Barefoot
Lawyer. Rather than diminishing though, the CCP totalitarianism continued to escalate under the
leadership of Xi Jinping starting in 2012.
A few of the myriad human rights violations committed under his regime include the setting-up
of a social credit score system which targets human rights activists throughout China, the forced
seclusion of the Uyghur population inside “re-education camps” in the region of Xinjiang, and
the enforcement of unprecedented 1984-style COVID policy restrictions.
Since the CCP variant was never defeated and kept mutating, what is the antidote to stop it?
In a letter to his wife, the Marquis De Lafayette wrote in 1777: “The welfare of America is
intimately connected with the happiness of all mankind; she will become the respectable and safe
asylum of virtue, integrity, tolerance, equality, and a peaceful liberty”. From the very outset, the
founding of America was a historical event transcending time and space.
As G.K Chesterton put it: “America is the only nation founded on a creed”; this creed is
contained in the Declaration of Independence which lays out that all men are created equal and
endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, among these life, liberty, and the
pursuit of happiness. These words applied to the thirteen American colonies in 1776 as much as
they do to China today.
The American Republic is a living example to the peoples of the world of a system of
government founded upon principles which acknowledge the dignity of the human person,
natural rights, and constitutional government. Such principles have been historically associated
with the natural law tradition exemplified in the works of Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas.
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This tradition is also echoed by the Tao principle (道) in Confuncian thought as expressed by
C.S. Lewis in The Abolition of Man; according to Lewis, all civilizations draw their
understanding of morality from the same first principles of practical reason which become
embodied in institutions and laws across cultures.
The universality of the Tao was best illustrated in the conference which produced the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 mirroring the plural understandings on the same first
principles expressed by the representatives of different countries. The Chinese representative to
the conference was Mr. Peng Chun Chang who served as vice chairman for the Human Rights
Commission and reminded his peers that human rights are for everyone, not just Western people.
America is thus a timeless source of inspiration for the Chinese people to rediscover their own
tradition. Just as America challenged the British Empire and Little Li stood up against the
Communist soldiers, the Chinese people may reclaim the Tao in order to free themselves from
the CCP virus.