What Beijing fears most? Freedom and true happiness
Re: “China was hell for decades – but it’s a living paradise now!”, Have Your Say, yesterday.
Our local wumao – or state-paid Chinese internet trolls – communicate in a manner which reveals their inability to distinguish between true happiness of the heart and materialism. Paradise is not a place where individuals are increasingly offered the opportunity to exploit themselves in a continuous round of self-indulgence.
Notice how Chinese propagandists numbly reel off a litany of opportunities to pleasure themselves, together with a cornucopia of material achievements, and equate these things with the characteristics of happiness. Happiness is a matter of the heart. It’s characteristic is inherent freedom. Happiness at root is a spiritual matter, not the achievement of building 5G and the world’s longest tunnel-and-bridge. True happiness does not require a list in its demonstration, rather it’s sign is compassion and tolerance.
The Chinese Communist Party quite obviously is a self-obsessed assembly of power-hungry individuals without an iota of spiritual sensitivity in evidence. Their efforts to destroy Christianity, Islam and Buddhism, as well as other smaller self-realisation movements, are proof of their fear that people’s freedom will become widely understood to be of primary importance. For examples see the Tiananmen massacre and the current demonstrations in Hong Kong.
What else is hell, if not a place of droning selfishness, spiritual oppression and unhappiness? Western civilisation did not force the CCP into existence nor require industrial chemicals to be substituted for milk powder and then fed to children. Unremitting selfishness did that. This must first be acknowledged, through the relinquishment of pride, before it can be outgrown. I would invite the wumao to give up their 50 cents worth of face and accept reality as it is.
Michael Setter
Chon Buri
