78-15-B6
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Chinese Libertarians[edit]
Transcript[edit]To countless thousands--perhaps millions--of Chinese, Li-I-Che is a hero. Actually the name "Li-I-Che" is a pseudonym for three former Red Guards who shocked Communist China in 1974. Since there are no newspapers open to the free exchange of the ideas on the mainland of China, Li-I-Che painstakingly created a poster of more than 20,000 Chinese characters. It extended over a hundred yards along a wall on the Peking road in the city of Canton. The poster was so powerful that thousands came to read it, and traffic had to be rerouted along the busy road. The message of the poster was, in effect, that the Peoples Republic of China had become a monstrous, repressive "social-fascist" monopoly of all economic and political power. Not surprisingly, the three young authors were dragged off to labor camps for "re-education". Their poster, however, is not forgotten. An intensely active movement, called the 70's Libertarian Front, has sprung up in Hong Kong to carry on the attack against the Peking regime. The main thrust of the 70's Front is the contention that Red China has become a giant monopolistic corporation. Like any giant monopoly, the Chinese state imposes universally low wages, causes shortages of consumer goods, manipulates prices, creates privileged bureaucracies, and practices "labor bossism". The economy is governed by raw political power, rather than by the law of supply and demand. The state corporation has become a religious cult, and criticism of the regime is suppressed. The new Chinese libertarians are not defenders of Western-style private enterprise, nor do they have kind words for the Republic of China on Taiwan. But they do recognize how much better off the worker is under competitive capitalism. They write, "Labor power can be freely sold and mobile under competitive capitalism, but under monopolistic capitalism within the domain of the State, labor power can be sold only to the State.... Under the rule of the communists, the people do not have the freedom to choose their occupation or employment; they do not have the right to choose their place of residence. They are ruthlessly deprived of the freedoms of speech, of press, and of association, which, though guaranteed by the Chinese Constitution, are never allowed because their exercise would threaten the power of the ruling regime." Simply put, they add, "We oppose all dictatorships, all governments, all forms of statism, and all authority. We stand for endlessly evolving freedom, for we sense that individual freedom is the prior condition of freedom of all, and that once the individual is robbed of his or her freedom, freedom for all cannot possibly exist. Likewise when the collective good ignores or suppresses individual interest, that spells the end of the collective good." The appeals of the 70's Libertarian Front may never succeed in toppling the Peking regime, but they are a thorny threat to its stability and security. More important, they are a reminder to the Western world that the regime of Mao Tse-tung's successors is still authoritarian and repressive, a statist monopoly founded on violence and propaganda and destructive of the humane traditions of the Chinese people themselves. This is Ronald Reagan. Thanks for listening. |
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