Schedium

Xi Jinping: Consolidation of power (photo by By 美国之音 )  In an article published on Taiwan 's website Apple Daily , Wang Dan casts away all hopes that the People's Republic of China might eventually move towards democracy. On the contrary. Under the leadership of Xi Jinping , he writes, the Communist Party is undergoing a process of "Fascistisation" (中共的法西斯化).  Wang Dan is a prominent Chinese political thinker and activist, but one whose fate has been tragically shaped by Communist media censorship. His name has been erased from mainland China's collective memory and history, just like the political upheaval of which he was a leader in 1989. During that decade, in which China's authorities cautiously allowed an unprecedented degree of freedom, Wang Dan was one of the organisers of the "Democratic Salon", a study group and discussion platform on the campus of Beijing University. Wang Dan was a twenty-year-old student who, like many other...

On October 1, 1949, Mao Zedong proclaimed the foundation of the People's Republic of China in front of a jubilant crowd in Tiananmen Square. The images of that historic moment have become famous all over the world. But few know who were the people standing behind Mao as he was holding his speech.  Most of them were, like Mao, Communist revolutionaries and high-ranking politicians, such as  Zhu De (朱德) , Liu Shaoqi ( 刘少奇 /   劉少奇) , and Zhou Enlai ( 周恩来 /  周恩來) .  However, one also finds names of people who were not members of the Communist Party: Song Qingling ( 宋庆龄 /  宋慶齡) , the wife of Sun Yat-sen , the man who had founded the Republic of China which the Communists had long fought to overthrow; Zhang Lan ( 张澜 /  張瀾) , the founder of the China Democratic League ; and Li Jishen (李濟深), the chairman of the Revolutionary Committee of the Chinese Guomindang (RCCG). In fact, the PRC was founded - at least in theory - as a multi-party state und...