Chen Guangcheng: “They Are Scared of the Countryside”
Ian Johnson interviews dissident Chen Guangcheng in a New York University classroom. Continuing the transcript style of his Bao Tong interview, Johnson asks Chen many probing questions, from China’s incoming leadership to grassroots political consciousness and spiritual awareness:
Ian Johnson:H ...
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Indeed, what motivates many if not most of these harsh CCP crackdowns on real or imagined opposition to one-party authoritarian rule is the fear of losing one’s “official cap”–or even one’s head–if opposition to the unaccountable government were allowed to grow as it did in Spring 1989. There is seldom any consideration of the fact that the vast majority of (former) communist officials in the USSR and eastern Europe were not punished (other than losing their privileges as members of the nomenklatura) after the one-party Leninist regimes fell.