Did they really think we wouldn’t notice?

The Chinese Communist Party, an organization so bent on preserving its rule and stomping out all dissent that they will kill thousands to keep a dam running in Sichuan, drive cars into anti-pollution protestors in Zhejiang, and surround a group of military veteran appellants in Beijing before anyone can even hear their grievance, would like us to believe tens of thousands of protestors managed to come together in the capital city and attack the Japanese Embassy with a barrage of rocks and eggs twice in eight days without their knowledge and against their wishes. There is a word to describe the Communists’ explanation of the riots, but decency forbids me to use it.

In fact, the truth made it to the New York Times last week, when one of the “protestors” confessed that the entire “riot” was orchestrated by the police:

“Yet the police herded protesters into tight groups, let them take turns throwing rocks, then told them they had ‘vented their anger’ long enough and bused them back to campus. ‘It was partly a real protest and partly a political show,’ Mr. Sun said in an interview this week. ‘I felt a little like a puppet.’”

How long Mr. Sun has as a free man in Communist China is anyone’s guess, but by the next weekend, the cadres were at it again, only this time they put on a better show – a minimal police presence was there. Somehow, it couldn’t contain the crowd – no appellants, dams, or chemical factories to worry about here – and the Japanese Embassy was pelted with more eggs and rocks.

By now, no one really believed this was a genuine, spontaneous protest – or at least not one that did not have the cadres’ approval and encouragement. That leads to the important question: why? What led the cadres to decide busting some windows in Japan’s Embassy was worth the public relations headache and the possible economic consequences from the Japanese government?

The Communists would have us believe it was a combination of factors – a Japanese textbook that airbrushed various atrocities by Tokyo’s empire during World War II, Japan’s quest for a seat on the United Nations Security Council, and its recent joint declaration with the United States regarding Taiwan. There are several flaws with this cover story.

For starters, textbook flaps have always flared up in one form or another; almost none led the cadres to this sort of thing. Additionally, the textbook in question is not universally accepted in Japan – less than 1% of schools are using it. Communist China has show more tact with Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement and Taiwan’s Democratic Progressive Party – and the latter is actually in charge in Taiwan. As for the Security Council, the Communists have already effectively killed any expansion of that body in the foreseeable future, although they’d rather not have India, Brazil, and Germany find that out. Finally, Japan’s Self-Defense Forces are still disallowed from deployment in overseas combat, making their support for the U.S. position on Taiwan a diplomatic triumph and little else.

No, Japan is not really the issue here. There is something else at work, and it is much closer to home. Taiwan’s Central News Agency noticed it two days before the first riot (via the Epoch Times):

“Lin Baohua, a political commentator in New York, said on April 3 that Beijing authorities have stirred up anti-Japan sentiment for domestic reasons. This was to alleviate internal distress, from the “Resignations from the Chinese Communist Party” Movement and the Anti-Secession Law, by diverting the public’s focus to the anti-Japan sentiment.”

In other words, the entire “anti-Japan sentiment” is not aiming at a Japanese textbook, or a Tokyo-Washington communiqué. Its target is another piece of literature altogether: the Nine Commentaries on the Chinese Communist Party.

That the resignations spawned by the Commentaries have made an impact can not be challenged. By the time you are reading this, the number of ex-Party members may have reached one million, and that’s without the ones still listed on party roles despite refusing to pay membership fees and finding their resignations pointedly refused. Readers of kiosks and newspaper boards all over Communist China have seen statements from former cadres disgusted with the Party once they read the Commentaries. These nine documents have filled in the holes in the Chinese collective memory, holes deliberately dug by Mao Zedong, Deng Xiapoing, Jiang Zemin, and Hu Jintao, to be filled with Communist propaganda.

Communist China cannot afford to have the resignations continue, and they certainly cannot afford to have the rest of the world notice. Is it a coincidence that the first stone hit the Japanese Embassy less than 48 hours after a major Taiwanese news service took note of the resignations? Perhaps, but I doubt it.

In nations under Communist regimes, the only demonstrations allowed are the ones the Communists want people to attend. Vaclav Havel, in his seminal Letter to Gustav Husak, revealed the truth of these demonstrations – those who participate do so only to keep the Communists off their backs. The puppet protestors were aiming for the Japanese Embassy, but their masters were aiming for an enemy they could not see – the authors of the Nine Commentaries.

The Communist actions of the past two weeks remind me of The Wizard of Oz, when Dorothy and her friends notice the small man controlling the powerful “wizard.” The Communists would like the world to believe the powerful Chinese nation is rising up against Japan. In reality, top cadre Hu Jintao – the murderer of Hanyuan County and Huaxi village – is saying something more like this: “Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!”

D.J. McGuire is President and Co-Founder of the China e-Lobby, and the author of Dragon in the Dark: How and Why Communist China Helps Our Enemies in the War on Terror