Going Chinese: Chinese communism with western characteristics

Letter from the District Superior, Robert Brucciani, January 2021

My Dear Faithful,

Summary: Political, economic and cultural power in China is concentrated in the hands of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Cultural power includes power over religion. With direct help from the west, China has embraced state-controlled capitalism and is now a global superpower. In the west, political, economic and cultural power is similarly concentrated, not in the hands of a political organisation or individual state, but in the hands of a less visible financial elite. In both China and the west, cultural power has been exercised to promote an antithetical culture of death and to oppress and subvert the Catholic Church. In the light of recent events, it seems that Our Lady of Fatima’s prophecy of global communism is being realised and that we would do well to emulate the faithful Catholics of China who preserved their faith in a godless communist state.

Essence and properties of communism

The essence and properties of communism are described by Pope Pius XI in his encyclical Divinis Redemptoris. Communism is atheistic materialism in which there is no room for the idea of God; there is no difference between matter and spirit, between soul and body; there is neither survival of the soul after death nor any hope in a future life… Communism, moreover, strips man of his liberty, robs human personality of all its dignity, and removes all the moral restraints that check the eruptions of blind impulse. There is no recognition of any right of the individual in his relations to the collective; no natural right is accorded to human personality, which is a mere cog-wheel in the Communist system. In man's relations with other individuals, besides, Communists hold the principle of absolute equality, rejecting all hierarchy and divinely-constituted authority, including the authority of parents.

Communism in China

Shortly after Mao Tse-Tung, the Secretary-General of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), rose to absolute power when he declared the foundation of the People’s Republic of China on 1 October 1950 in Tiananmen Square in China, he set about dismantling Chinese society. The stated aim of the CCP was to create the ideal communist state: a godless, classless society with the common ownership of property.

Perhaps, Mao Tse-Tung’s ignorance of human nature was so profound that he believed that a communist utopia was possible, or perhaps he just saw the communist ideology as a vehicle to absolute power. Either way, he used his absolute power to create a totalitarian regime, a servile state.

The CCP started with the destruction of the natural order of society: it imposed its communist ideology and instilled fear in the whole population by ever-changing laws, threats, and arbitrary arrests. It declared whole classes (landowners, businessmen, intellectuals, the entire middleclass) and religions as enemies of the CCP and dispossessed them. It even dispossessed the peasants—taking away both their own land and the land that had been given to them from the spoils of private landowners. It destroyed independent enterprise and wealth. It killed as many as 60 million souls in its prisons and labour camps. Catholics were especially persecuted and the CCP-controlled Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association (CCPA) was established in 1957 in an attempt to replace the Catholic Church in China.

The only political party allowed was the CCP; the economy was centrally planned by the CCP, culture was dictated by the CCP, and religion was made subservient to the CCP. The result was a cruel backward failure. How could it be otherwise when the natural law was trampled upon and all aspiration to virtue extinguished? All those who held positions of authority were party officials and all party officials were corrupt.

Chinese Communism: Capitalism with Chinese characteristics

After a power struggle following Mao Tse-Tung’s death in 1976, Deng Xiaoping was proclaimed “Paramount Leader” by the CCP. Den Xiaoping addressed the problem of economic failure by introducing market capitalism into China, arguing that it was simply a temporary adaption of communist principles to suit local conditions in order to eventually achieve the communist utopia of a classless society with common ownership of property. The reforms both encouraged enterprise and tolerated ownership, but always under CCP control. This is the model that the current General Secretary of the CCP, Xi Jinping has developed since becoming the “Paramount Leader” in 2012.

With a huge supply of cheap labour, massive investment from western banks and multinationals, open western markets, gifted technology from the west (supplemented by state-sponsored industrial espionage), total political control and cultural tyranny, China has pursued a vigorous and unscrupulous strategy of economic imperialism. It has both purchased influence and secured resources abroad by hoovering-up commercial assets, bank-rolling foreign politicians and academics, and enslaving developing countries with too-good-to-be-true infrastructure projects. The net result is that China is now a superpower on centre stage in world affairs while remaining godless and in contempt of the natural law. This contempt is clearly manifest in its barbaric population control programme and extensive use of “re-education centres” for religious and political dissidents. It is important to note two facts: first, none of China’s development would have been possible without western capital, western markets and western collaboration; and second, China remains totally dependent on the west for its continued prosperity.

Concentrated power in the west

Political, economic and cultural power in the west has also followed a trajectory of concentration. The source of the west’s political power is dubiously claimed to be democracy, but in reality it is the money elite who exercise such control over education, media, big business and politicians that they abrogate political power to themselves. The same is true for economic power because almost every government, company and individual is dependent on the banks who lend them money, thereby becoming dependent upon those who control the banks. Finally, western culture, being driven by global media companies, politicians, academia and the host of institutions of the capitalist state, conforms itself to the money elite too.

Even the Catholic Church, once a powerful force for natural and supernatural order in the world, appears to be in the thrall of the same elite. Since the Second Vatican Council, its churchmen, wanting to be loved by the world, have shut their eyes to the supernatural end of man and to the social reign of Christ the King to embrace the new global culture with its new secular religion. They have even submitted themselves to the Chinese authorities of late, thus betraying their own persecuted children there.

The party cannot last

In short, power has been purchased with money, but this resource has its limitations. When all the money in circulation is borrowed and there is not enough economic growth to pay back the interest, the whole money system is destined to collapse. This is an urgent problem that the world, including China, is facing. Since the policy of quantitative easing employed by central banks in 2009 to prop-up the teetering financial system after the 2008 debt crisis, the world financial system has been on life support with no real remedies to bring it back to health.

Going Chinese: Communist with western characteristics

Enter the Covid-19 virus response, with its truly massive government borrowing, unprecedented erosion of individual freedoms (notably religious practice), alarming increase in surveillance and targeted economic sabotage—all coordinated on a global scale.

What we are living through now looks very much like a controlled demolition of the old-world order based on the US dollar to clear the way for the “Great Reset” which promises all things wonderful, but really is communism without any intention of ending in the common ownership of property. The west is going Chinese with western characteristics: namely, totalitarian control of politics, economics and culture after the manner of the People’s Republic of China, but instead of there being a visible pinnacle of power—the Paramount Leader with his own cult—the source of power in the west is hidden from view and operates through the myriad of institutions that make up the “Establishment” following the model of cultural hegemony described by the Marxist thinker Antonio Gramasci (1891–1937); and instead of worshipping the head of state, a new religion of earth-worship and political correctness is being imposed.

Who is the Paramount Leader of the west?

Allusions have been made to the “money elite” as being in direct control of governments, economic policy and culture in the west and having indirect control of China. This money elite is believed to be made up of members of the Rothschild, Rockefeller, Carnegie, and other financial dynasties, together with global stars that have made their own way into the inner circle. There is plenty of evidence to support this claim—even their own admission—but are they at the top of the pile? What is uniting them? Is it Freemasonry or something to which Freemasonry is subservient? When one considers that a common theme of political, economic and cultural change over the last 70 years is the deliberate erosion of natural law and the promotion of the culture of death, it would seem that there are darker forces than the greed or megalomania of an elite in play. When we also see that the Catholic Church has been the object of an organised infiltration and has suffered its own revolution (at the Second Vatican Council), we discern the footprints of Satan in the world.

Going Chinese Catholic

What we are witnessing now could well be the fulfilment of the prophecy of Our Lady at Fatima on 13 July 1917: that Russia’s errors—the tenets of communist ideology—will spread across the whole world.

For Catholics, because we are in such small numbers and because large sections of the hierarchy of the Church are complicit in the revolution, it is unrealistic to imagine that we could overcome the forces of evil by throwing ourselves into those institutions where the culture of death now reigns. As in China, the natural route is ostensibly closed; we should therefore put all our energy into the supernatural.

If our society is descending into Chinese communism with western characteristics, we would do well to see how the Catholic Church survived and even grew in the face of persecution by the CCP. From 1952, the Church in China went underground, and despite social isolation, arrests, fines, imprisonment, brainwashing, torture and executions, many Catholics persevered. Faithful Catholics ran to Our Lady when they were threatened: they recited her rosary in the absence of Mass, and joined her Legion of Mary in the absence of a parish structure. They flocked to her shrines. Rosaries were the weapons, the Legion of Mary was the army.

Brought from Ireland to China in 1931 by Fr. Aedan McGrath of the Missionary Society of St. Columba, the Legion of Mary became an instrument of survival of the Catholic Church when the visible hierarchy was dismantled by the CCP between 1950 and 1955. Legionaries trained catechists, baptised, witnessed marriages, and encouraged devotion and perseverance among the faithful when there were no priests left. They worked in secret, giving Catholics and catechumens a formation that would help them both endure the suffering of persecution and spread the faith to other afflicted souls who, stripped of the distractions of the material world, were fertile ground for the divine life.

It is unlikely that Catholics in the west will be subject to the same physical sufferings as the Chinese Catholics, but moral, financial and legal pressure must certainly be expected. We should emulate the Chinese Catholics in the their virtues of prayer, penance and perseverance, and perhaps it is time to rekindle the Legion of Mary in the District or to use the Militia Immaculatae in the same way.

In Fatima, Our Lady revealed to Lucia, Francesco and Jacinta that the errors of Russia might be averted by the consecration of Russia to the Immaculate Heart of Mary, the five first Saturday devotion and the daily recitation of the Rosary. While only the pope in union with all the bishops of the world can consecrate Russia to the Immaculate Heart of Mary, it is a cause for which we can both earnestly pray and campaign. As for the five first Saturday devotion and the daily recitation of the Rosary, this is something that most Catholics can do—certainly daily Rosary.

We should be ready to follow the example of persecuted Chinese Catholics who themselves were like the Holy Family in many ways. The Holy Family were shelterless because they were forced to leave their home to comply with a law of government, unwelcome and treated like cattle by the establishment in Bethlehem, and having to abandon everything in their flight from Herod. Having lost everything in the world, they nevertheless possessed the greatest of all treasures: the Divine Infant—God in the flesh and God in their souls.

As we adore the Child Jesus in the crib this Christmas, let us beg the graces of fidelity and fortitude for what may well be a dramatic year ahead. On behalf of all the members of the Society, dear faithful, please accept my thanks for all your spiritual and temporal help over the last year, and please be assured of our desire, prayers and sacrifices that you may find true peace where it alone can be found: in the arms our Heavenly Mother who holds out her Son to us.

Our Lady of China, pray for us!

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