September 16 will mark the death anniversary of Yin Hai-kuang. The renowned Chinese educator and philosopher passed away 51 years ago at National Taiwan University Hospital, after having been deprived of freedom of speech and freedom to write under Chiang Kai-shek regime. He spent his later years living in a society that had no political freedom, and yet with his moral virtues and passion, he relentlessly tried to guard his freedom as a citizen. In a way, this perseverance was a fruit of the seeds he sowed in his early years of fighting against something else.

In recent years, talks of a “new cold war” have dominated political narratives, due to the strategic confrontation between the U.S. and China, and as a result of the paradigm shift of the strategic order formed since the 1970s. As such, the character of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), which is one of the players in the strategic rivalry with the U.S., has become an important topic.

Speeches delivered by U.S. State Secretary Mike Pompeo and the like make it clear that the U.S. wants to set apart the CCP, which carries ideological significance, from Chinese people, a concept that has an ethnic aspect to it. The U.S. positions the CCP as the world’s most threatening totalitarian regime since the Soviet Union, and Xi Jinping is compared to totalitarian leaders intending to establish a hegemony, such as Josef Stalin.

Some people think that such a positioning is a strategic misjudgment, and Beijing is making all-out efforts to hit back at that. A recent speech made by Xi is particularly weighty. He said: “Chinese people would never agree to any people and forces trying to distort the history of the Chinese Communist Party, vilify the nature and purpose of the Communist Party.”

That was putting “China” and “Chinese people” on a par with the “CCP regime”.

A couple of weeks ago, a friend from the Yin Hai-kuang Foundation sent me two electronic files sourced from the national library. They are two pamphlets penned by Yin and published in Shanghai in 1948, respectively titled “Maxism and Politics in Practice” and “Observation of the Chinese Communist Party”. The former has never been compiled in any of Yin’s books; the latter was compiled in his complete work released in the 1990s and I had read it. In the lead-up to his death anniversary, and at a time when a new cold war atmosphere was all too palpable, I re-read the pamphlets, which the renowned academic wrote prior to the Cold War and before a regime change in China altered the course of Chinese history.

In fact, part of the content of “Observation of the Chinese Communist Party” is discussed in Yin’s book Darkness Before the Light, which was released three years before the pamphlet was published. In other words, around the time the war of resistance against Japan ended, Yin already paid attention to the “communist issue” that he deemed a “worrying” political development in China. The book opened with an “important issue concerning the history and survival of the Chinese nation”, of which he said one should have a “serious understanding”. As for “Maxism and Politics in Practice”, Yin wrote it at the age of 26, when the war had just ended and he finished his stint as a young soldier. The content of this pamphlet about politics was actually outmoded at the time, given that the “progressive thought” of the left was occupying the moral high ground. But Yin believed that whether one agreed with a political narrative or not, it was necessary to have a good understanding of it. So at a time when the CCP had not taken power but occupied several areas in Northern China, Yin came up with a profound analysis of the party.

In the second year after the pamphlets were out, the CCP took power. Seventy years on, one cannot help feeling amazed by the astute observation of Yin as a young man. From a methodological point of view, he pointed out that “the CCP has one objective and plenty of strategies; its nature never changes but its form alters from time to time. These four points form the four fundamental categories of the CCP issue”. He said the CCP was characterized by its deceptive nature, a propensity to change its form and a special kind of ethics, and that the party had a unique, strong tendency to exclude others, and therefore it operated under “a system of rivalry” from day one. He also noted that the CCP adopted a religious attitude towards ideologies and it was extremely incompatible with the idea of accommodating differences.

When we incorporate real-life examples in Yin’s four categories, we may be even more stunned by his sharp observation. After the CCP took power, Mao Zedong issued an instruction saying the party led everything in seven realms, namely labor, agriculture, commerce, education, military, politics, and the party. Years later, Xi wrote into the party constitution “the party leads all affairs - the party, political, military, civil, and academic - east, west, south, north, and center”. All this echoes Yin’s view about the CCP’s “one objective”.

The pamphlets contain many brilliant observations. For example, Yin pointed out the problem of “mistaking the Communist Party as an ordinary political party” and the mistake of thinking “the Communist Party can be bound by treaties”. According to Yin, for the CCP, “a treaty is effective for as long as [the party] is not yet powerful, and will become invalid when it is powerful”. In view of how the Sino-British Joint Declaration has now become a “historical document”, we salute once again Yin’s astuteness.

(Hang Zhi, political commentator and former secretary-general of the National Security Council of Taiwan)

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