The American ambassador to China, Nicholas Burns, published a message of condolence on Thursday following the passing of Jiang Zemin, a former president of China responsible for the post-Tiananmen Square crackdown on anti-communist dissent and the live harvesting of organs from Falun Gong prisoners.
Burns at press time is the only senior U.S. government representative to acknowledge Jiang’s death. The U.S. State Department has not published any official expression of lament for his passing. During a moment of silence and remembrance for Jiang at the United Nations Security Council on Wednesday, America’s representative did not honor Jiang, nor did the representatives from India and the United Kingdom.
The Chinese Communist Party claimed this week that Jiang, 96, died of leukemia. Jiang served as president and head of the Communist Party between 1993 and 2003, coming into power in the aftermath of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre after serving as mayor of Shanghai. While Jiang was not president during the mass murder of thousands of protesters, many of them young students, the first and most important task under his rule was to ensure that the rest of the world did not isolate China as a result of its human rights atrocities. Under Jiang, China ultimately attracted major economic investments and joined the World Trade Organization (WTO), eventually resulting in the country becoming the world’s second-largest economy. Jiang did this while being entirely unapologetic about the Tiananmen Square massacre.
“We do not believe that there was any tragedy in Tiananmen Square,” Jiang said in September 1989, while mayor of Shanghai. “What actually happened was a counterrevolutionary rebellion aimed at opposing the leadership of the Communist Party and overthrowing the socialist system.”
Jiang used his power to silence all opposition to communism in the country and pressure the rest of the world not to condemn the ensuing brutality. His other major legacy is the destruction of the Falun Gong spiritual movement within China, which he called an “evil cult.” Evidence from Communist Party documentation suggests that Jiang personally orchestrated a campaign to kill Falun Gong practitioners by carving their organs out of their bodies and selling them to willing buyers.
“The United States expresses condolences to former President of the PRC [Communist China] Jiang Zemin’s family and the Chinese people,” Ambassador Burns said in a message posted to Twitter. “President Jiang worked to advance the U.S.-PRC relationship at a consequential time while managing our differences – an imperative that continues today.”
Burns’ comment differed from the silence out of the State Department, where Secretary of State Antony Blinken has yet to address Jiang’s death at press time. America’s representatives to the U.N. Security Council, where both America and China are permanent members, also did not speak on Jiang’s death during the time reserved to honor him on Wednesday.
Jiang’s death arrived at a volatile time for the Communist Party, currently facing a wave of nationwide protests against communist ideology and particularly against the regime’s “zero-Covid” policy, which uses house arrest and mass internment in quarantine camps to allegedly contain the spread of Chinese coronavirus. Some of the country’s largest cities – including the capital, Beijing, and Shanghai, Guangzhou, Chenghu, and Zhengzhou – experienced waves of hundreds of people taking the streets last week, chanting slogans against current dictator Xi Jinping and against the lockdowns.
While the Communist Party claims that its mass house arrest plan is the only responsible way to approach public health during a pandemic, its own death statistics appear to show that more people died as a result of “zero-Covid” measures than Chinese coronavirus infections in China in the past six months. Deaths tied to “zero-Covid” occurred as a result of suicide, starvation, or the government blocking citizens from access to necessary and basic medications. Others, including infants, reportedly died as a result of being turned away from hospitals during emergencies due to not having been tested recently enough for Chinese coronavirus.
The Biden administration has remained mostly silent on the protests, refusing to support pro-human rights protesters.
“We’re on the side of individuals being able to freely assemble and to express their views, whatever those views are. We’re not taking a side in terms of what these protestors are about,” White House national security spokesman John Kirby said on Wednesday.
The Biden administration, and Joe Biden himself, have supported stringent protocols to allegedly contain Chinese coronavirus, including unconstitutional vaccine mandates, sanitary mask mandates, shutting down schools, and a nationwide lockdown.
Like the Biden administration, left-wing corporate media outlets in the United States similarly regaled Jiang as an economic mastermind rather than condemning his bloody legacy.
“Mr. Jiang’s stewardship of the capitalist transformation that had begun under Deng Xiaoping was one of his signal accomplishments,” the far-left New York Times publication, which celebrated the 100th anniversary of the Russian revolution in 2017 with a series of articles promoting communism, proclaimed this week. “He also amassed political influence that endured long past his formal retirement, giving him a big say behind the scenes in picking the current president, Xi Jinping.”
Jiang, the Associated Press recalled, “led China out of isolation after the army crushed the Tiananmen Square pro-democracy protests in 1989 and supported economic reforms that led to a decade of explosive growth.”
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