by Wei Jingsheng

The great Chinese dissident warns about a rising number of traitors within the pro-democracy movement, inside and outside of China. He offers a way to limit their harm. The Communists are afraid of the movement and are trying to destroy it within.

Washington (AsiaNews) – Ruling with spies is one of the core pillars of the Chinese Communist Party's rule. It succeeded with the traditional methods, both Chinese and foreign, as well as ancient and current methods. Besides an effort to control the politics of its enemies by using economic sanctions and buy-ins, the Chinese Communists even developed spy methods, which are called "redirect back to China after exporting overseas".

In an effort to destroy various opposition activities, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is not only trying to gain access and information within the opposition, but also putting in effort to deliver faulty information by detouring long distances. In the past 20 years, the scale of the democratic movement and religious and Falun Gong groups' activities have reached a magnificent level. Thus, the Communist Party's spying scales and technologies are also rising with the tide, to a ubiquitous degree with a high technical proficiency. It has become the main pillar in support the rule of the Chinese Communist Party.

There are two main types of spying activities by the CCP against the people's resistance. The first could be summarized as "to pull out, then strike in"; while the second could be summarized as "to put in, then strike out". The purposes of both methods are the same, with similar methods. However, their directions and targets are somewhat different. The related CCP departments in charge might also be special depending on circumstances.

Here is an example of a typical method of "to pull out, then strike in". It uses the weakness of some people inside China to pull those within the democratic movement or members of the religious groups who already have a name recognition out, to work for the Communists' regime. Then, it will use them to control and even damage the opposition organizations inside and/or outside China.

Some of these people are even already exposed inside China, and thus lack much value there. However, the CCP then uses its capacity in the media to raise their reputation, then to get them outside China. Because of the lack of flown communication between China and the overseas, our friends overseas do not know the situation inside China well. These new people would pretend to be steadfast democracy activists overseas, to continuously dupe our overseas friends and the international media. They would even use communication tools that are already monitored and supervised to make frequent communication with people inside China, and to sell out the democracy activists inside China. This is their basic work.

Besides this basic work, there is a higher-level work that takes advantage of the fact that our people inside China do not know overseas people well, and often have a wrongful mentality of blind trust in overseas. This allows these overseas agents to direct the opposition movement inside China. The result is that the opposition movement inside China follows the wrong path, meanwhile exposing itself to the intelligence organizations of the Chinese Communist Party. Thus, the opposition groups would either be eliminated rather quickly, or become a masked body snatcher to let the CCP to destroy other opposition groups.

There was an opposition organization that was well known both inside and outside China that went down exactly such a path. Some of its veteran members could not take various inhuman tortures in jail, and thus surrendered themselves. They admitted to be wrong and yielded to the CCP police. This would be a very normal situation. After all, how many people could suffer the inhuman tortures of the CCP? I am sympathetic to all these people who had to surrender themselves, not for any other reason than just because they are also human. To surrender is normal. More or less, it is not a very fair treatment to receive criticism after one had to surrender.

Many people surrendered, so they were released in advance, or released quickly. Although they surrendered themselves, they did not defect to the enemy, did not sell out our friends, and did not work for the spy agencies of the Chinese Communists. Although they do not dare or do not want to continue the opposition activities, but at least they are still friends of the democratic movement, or at least personal friends.

However, there is a small portion of these people who either because their vulnerable points were grasped by the CCP police, or because they want to maintain the heroic image of themselves, gradually yield themselves to the despotic power of the police. In the beginning, they only do smaller things for the police, which do not violate their own conscience, but gradually the scale is expanded to become traitors and evil as to sell out their friends and abet the evildoers.

They use the excuse of "having different opinions" as a shield for all the things they are doing. In addition, they assume the wrongful yet popular opinion both inside and outside China, that only evidence proved in the courts are the standard for us to judge people. Thus, there isn't anyone who could confirm these type of agents' identities, and it is difficult to warn other friends to avoid the persecution brought on by these agents. This process has directly resulted in damage to the democratic movement and religious groups both inside and outside China.

However, not everyone in the opposition is a fool. As the saying goes, time will testify the truth. Gradually, these traitors expose themselves. When they lose their value to cheat inside China, the CCP uses the media to send them overseas to continuously cheat the international public opinion, in an effort to influence international society's support to the Chinese democratic movement.

What these people do far surpasses the average intelligence collection. They have become the main supporters of the pro-CCP politicians in the West. With the financial support of the Western big businesses, for the common targets of the CCP and these big businesses, they are lobbying around the Western governments and parliaments as either professionals or seeming to be amateurs. They join in force together and work hard to maintain the CCP's rule, as well as the super profits of the big businesses.

Within the so-called overseas Chinese democratic movement circle, there are a few people like that, who once had others' trust yet now carry this special mission. When the political circle in the West is facing some major dispute with the CCP, in particular when there is some dispute related to Chinese human rights and democracy, we see some well recognized people came out to speak in favour of the Chinese Communist Party. Thus on key disputed issues during the crucial times, they foiled the side that supports Chinese human rights and democracy.

These people often make faulty testimony and to prove the pro-CCP views were correct within the rank of human rights and democracy, thus seriously influenced the view points of the politicians and people who support Chinese democracy and human rights yet do not know China issues that well. These people have not only contributed to the CCP's media war in the West, but also indirectly influenced the opposition movement inside China.

There is a simple yet effective method to distinguish this type of person with a special mission. That is to check on their true political stand, especially their actions on the disputed issues during the crucial times, instead of reading the evaluation by the Western media. More than ten years ago, the overseas Chinese democracy movement already started applying this kind of method to prevent further damage by these agents.

There is an important principle carried out by our Overseas Chinese Democracy Coalition. This principle is to examine one's stand and action, instead of valuing one's past credits. Whenever the Chinese democracy movement is facing an important issue and important turning point, there are agents jumping out to sing a different tune or to hold a stand of opposition. If our democratic friends could see and understand the current main targets of the democracy movement, it would be fairly easy to recognize these special agents who jump out enthusiastically. Some people do not see the situation clearly, or lack a judging capacity, while some veterans with good intelligence still appear to lack understanding. The latter might not be truly confused, but of major suspicion.

There is a frustration among many of our friends in the past years, which is that even if we know who the special agents are, we just could not do much. We cannot do what happened between the Communist Party and KuoMinTang back in the last century, when they cultivated special "traitor elimination task forces" to execute all the special agents they knew. Nowadays, this could be called terrorism by the international society. As a matter of fact, there were special agents giving such suggestions to the overseas democracy movement, but we were not fooled.

The methods applied by our Overseas Chinese Democracy Coalition for years have been proven to be effective. That is, when we found out spies or critical spy suspects, we just separate them from our main work. This is because:

First, even if we may have wrongfully judged the person, it would not produce major serious consequence. There are chances for correction in the future. It is a smaller issue to misjudge one person at the time, than the result of a serious damage to the Chinese democracy movement, even the safety of the other democratic activists. When there are two harms, we choose the lesser one. After all, there is no single country that would use the court standards for their anti-spy intelligence. Some agents like to release smoke bombs, that result in many confused brains getting fooled.

Second, what we do results in these special agents becoming unable to accomplish what they were supposed to do. Thus, they become valueless to the Chinese Communist Party. We do not need to punish them, because the CCP itself would take that action. The CCP never treasures the valueless agents because the Communists themselves are also human with normal human morals. There is no person who likes traitors who betray their own comrades, unless there is some useful value.

The overseas Chinese democracy movement has been successfully preventing the espionage of the CCP agents in the past decade. These experiences and lessons are the wealth to our friends inside China and worthy to be learned by all the people who have conflicts with the CCP. I hope our friends inside China would give up some fancy theories that do not meet reality, to keep clear minds in an effort to prevent the damages from the CCP spies. Otherwise, you could be paying the price with the destruction of your organization and misery of yourselves.