The son of a founding revolutionary of the Chinese Communist Party has penned an open letter, published in a Hong Kong newspaper, telling Chinese leader Xi Jinping to end one-party dictatorship and transform China into a democracy.
“If you really want to eliminate corruption,” writes Luo Yu, who is now 71 and lives in the United States, “the only way is to introduce democracy in a gradual and orderly fashion.”
“China is beset by crises: a crisis in faith, morality, the environment, the economy, finance, education, medicine, and natural resources,” Luo continues. “Why? The root of all the problems is the one-party dictatorship of the Chinese Communist Party.”
The remarkable open letter was published in the Hong Kong-based Chinese newspaper Apple Daily on Dec. 3.
Luo Yu joins the growing list of former Party cadres, Chinese dissidents, and veteran China watchers who are predicting that the Chinese regime is teetering on collapse, in contrast to the image of a rising superpower the authorities seek to project to the world.
The letter also comes at a time when the top Party leadership seems increasingly paranoid that the regime will collapse if it wavers from orthodox Marxist beliefs.
The Luo and Xi families have a deep history together, as indicated in how Luo addresses Xi Jinping as “brother Xi.”
He opens the letter by reminding Xi of the close relationship their parents shared. Luo Ruiqing, a very early Party member and the founder of the regime’s public security apparatus, and Xi Zhongxun, who formerly headed the Party’s propaganda department, became “intimate friends” after both were made vice premiers of the State Council—the equivalent of China’s cabinet—in 1959.
Their wives would watch plays at the Great Hall of the People together, and visited each other after Luo Ruiqing’s death from illness in 1978. They maintained contact after Xi Zhongxun was placed under house arrest—partly orchestrated by fallen Politburo member Bo Xilai’s father, Bo Yibo—in the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen after Xi Zhongxun backed reform-minded Chinese premier Hu Yaobang in the 1980s.
In the letter, Luo then congratulates Xi Jinping on staying in power despite an attempted coup by a rival political faction (consisting of former Politburo member and Chongqing strongman Bo Xilai and Zhou Yongkang, the former security chief), but insists that his anti-corruption campaign to rectify the Party will ultimately lead to its collapse.
“The entire Communist Party is rotten. No official isn’t corrupt, and by opposing corruption, you are opposing the Party,” Luo writes. “And in the Politburo Standing Committee, you have one supporter, one neutral, and four awaiting your fall.” There are seven members in the current Standing Committee, including Xi Jinping.
With myriad problems plaguing China and speeding the regime’s collapse, Luo Yu says Xi should allow a free press, allow the formation of new political parties, hold democratic elections, establish an independent judiciary, and turn over control of the military from the Party to the nation.
“You said at the United Nations: ‘Peace, development, equity, justice, democracy, and freedom are common values of all mankind’ … Please don’t say one thing and do another,” Luo writes.
“The Cultural Revolution, the Tiananmen Square Massacre, and the persecution of Falun Gong are all cases of the Party leading the way in violating the law,” Luo writes.
In concluding the letter, Luo says: “Our fathers were key revolutionaries of Mao Zedong … But after the revolution, instead of a democratic government, we have a dictatorship. That’s the difference between Mao and America’s George Washington.”
“I thought we could speak discreetly, being brothers from a similar background,” Luo adds, alluding to their heritage as princelings, or children of revolutionary leaders. “But as there are no channels for communication in a dictatorship, I have to resort to yelling from across the ocean.”