Monday, September 19, 2011

Starting the China Support Network:
Radio interview recalls activity of 1989

CSN's John Kusumi recalls starting to help China's democracy movement, in response to the Tiananmen massacre of June 4, 1989


What follows is an excerpt from a radio interview with John Kusumi (JPK), founder of the China Support Network. This was broadcast on Thursday, Sept. 1, 2011, on American Freedom Radio network, reaching about 20 radio stations across the United States.


Host:  I'm your host, Truther Girl Sonia, and I'm here with John Kusumi, former independent U.S. presidential candidate, and founder of the China Support Network.

...I have a couple of questions for you - how is China different? I mean, obviously it's a communist country, but how does the Chinese political system work? -Economic system, too.


JPK:  China, as we'll remember, the People's Republic was established by Chairman Mao in 1949, and that's by the Communist Party of China. Now, the Communist Party of China was sort of an off shoot, or it was basically encouraged or built up there, with aid from the Soviet Communist Party.  In fact it was like modelled or patterned on the Soviet Communist Party.

So, the trouble in China is that what they have there is anything but freedom.  It's the opposite.  It is a one-party dictatorship.  It's given to brutal totalitarianism.  And in general, we can just say that leading China, at the top in the leadership, is: communists, dictators, tyrants, and thugs.

I happened to be the same age as the college students who rose up in Tiananmen Square, and that was 1989 when they had the pro-democracy uprising.  And then the Chinese army was sent in to clear out the approach routes to Tiananmen Square.  About 3,000 people were killed.  We're talking about civilians of Beijing, being killed off in a massacre by the Chinese government.

In China, the thing is that what they have is the Communist Party; and everything else is subordinate to that, which means that the army really is not the army of the state, it's the army of the party.

Certain things like the Constitution of China -- it will bend to the will of the Communist Party.

It's almost like if you tried to install a deity; a God.  Something above all else.  The Communist Party just tries to put itself in there as the top level entity.  And anything else that you hear about -- the army, the Constitution -- it's the Party's army; the Party's Constitution.

China's state apparatus is there in name, but it's just a parallel thing.  In other words, there's a structure of people like, let's say, in the Party who care about business and then there might be "The Ministry of Economic Development" where they supposedly care about business.  And these two structures exist side-by-side, and someone from the Party works inside every office of that ministry.  The ministry is really like a sock puppet; the Party is pulling the strings.


Host:  Have you been there?


JPK:  No, I haven't. I've studied it, and I began in 1989 at the time of the massacre -- this was an eye popping thing on television. 
You know, when you watch a huge tragedy like maybe the earthquake in Haiti, or the tsunami in Asia, you know how people just want to help the cause. Well, Tiananmen Square was like that; it was a tragedy, the difference is that it was a man-made, not a natural tragedy, and to fight it it's a political fight, not just a matter of delivering some aid or something.

Anyway, there were top student leaders from the uprising who escaped out of China and came to the West.  They arrived in Washington DC, where they met me -- I was working on the China Support Network, a response organization that was built up spontaneously from the sentiment that "We've got to help this cause."


Host:  How did they know you were there?


JPK:  I was plugged in.  Somehow, there was a Chinese student group; I think it was graduate students at the University of Maryland.  And they had been given the heads up that these dissidents from Beijing were coming to town.  And so then I was on the phone with someone in the Maryland group, and they said, "I need your help."

So, I went there and a couple of other people - in fact, the China Support Network had, I think, four people in Washington for their first week.

We were a little bit like political handlers.  In other words, when you have a political campaign, there needs to be handlers who arrange things.  So, for their first time when they spoke at the National Press Club, guess who was the one who went down the street to rent out a room at the National Press Club?  I did that.  I was taking the phone calls; people were seeking the daybook, the schedule, and I had to arrange transportation and just everything of -- it was like a campaign swing through Washington DC, and the dissidents were the political stars at that time.

It was a popular cause at first.  America was very sympathetic in those days; we had just finished the Reagan years; we were accustomed to being staunch anti-Communists; and nobody thought that we should sit still, or take it, or countenance -- you know, it was mass murder of civilians in China!

I happen to suspect, if they had killed off 3,000 baby boomers, that we would have a very different China policy.  But the thing is that the student uprising was led by Generation X'ers, and basically that's the younger group that basically had no political voice at the time.

The administration of George Bush senior -- at the time, that was the U.S. executive branch under Bush, senior -- refused to meet with the dissidents as they arrived from China.  You would think that the leader of the free world might want to talk to the pro-democracy forces of China, but no -- the administration was refusing to meet with those dissidents.

However, during that first week, we did arrange that the dissidents had lunch with the Republican National Committee, and they met the Senate Joint Leadership with Bob Dole and George Mitchell.  So, there were Congressional faces who cared about the situation, or they wanted to meet with the dissidents, and there was plenty of news media attention.


Host:  But the government itself would not show any support for them.  But, that doesn't come as a big surprise to me, because China apparently has a lot of power economically over America, I mean, they hold--


JPK:  Well *now* they do.


Host:  Or, how was it back then?  They probably had an alliance though, at high levels all along.


JPK:  Well, of course there's a back story to all of this.  But now, the thing is that in the 1980s, the US trade deficit with China was always less than $5 billion.  It was maybe $2 billion, $3 billion; maybe topped out at $4 billion.  It was tiny; a tiny trade deficit.

And now it's over a quarter of a trillion.  So, the rise of our trade deficit with China has happened *afterwards*; *after* Tiananmen.   Almost like as if it's a reward for bad behavior.


Host:  Yes, that what it seems to me -- like this was probably the plan all along, was to have labor outsourced to the best place for cheap labor, which was China - Communist China.  And help that government to get rich, or their certain corporations, their elites, while benefiting off basically the slave labor, meanwhile undermining our own economy here in North America and turning us into slaves as well.

I tend to think that they had this planned out -- I mean, they couldn't have really thought that it was going to bring prosperity to the middle class, to have some corporations doing what they're doing with the free trade in China. And so, it probably -- it didn't really matter if they killed their own people, because they had America's support, or the government, executive branch -- they had their support.  So the government would just want to sweep it under the rug.