They would have needed more than a few AK-47's.
OTOH, If they were muslim terrorists they would have Obama sending them some really good weapons.
Posted on 09/07/2013 6:14:03 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
I was born in Chengdu, China. When I was growing up, the Communist Party controlled everything. There were no choices of any sort. We were all poor except the elite. The local government rationed everything from pork to rice, sugar, and flour because there were not enough supplies. We were allowed only a kilogram of pork per month for our family of five. We lived in two rooms, without heat in the winter. I got impetigo during the cold, humid winters. There were eight families living around our courtyard, and we all had to share one bathroom (a hole in the ground) for males, one for females. We had only government-run medical clinics, where the conditions were filthy and services were horrible. I was afraid of going there because I might get some other infectious diseases.
As children, we were brainwashed in school every day. We chanted daily: “Long Live Chairman Mao, Long Live the Communist Party.” I loved Chairman Mao. I was so brainwashed that I could see Chairman Mao in the clouds and fire. He was like a god to me. The powerful government watched us very closely, from the Beijing central government to our Communist block committees and local police stations. We had no rights, even though our constitution said we did.
It was frightening that local police could stop by our home to pound on the doors at night and search us for no good reason. People were arrested without court papers and locked up for months without trials.
Citizens were not allowed to have any guns or they would be put into prison, or worse. Chinese people were helpless when they needed to defend themselves. I grew up with fear, like millions of other children — fear that the police would pound on our doors at night and take my loved ones away, fear that bad guys would come to rob us. Sometimes I could not sleep from hearing the screaming people outside.
There were many stories of local people defending themselves with kitchen knives and sticks. Women were even more helpless when they were attacked and raped. I was molested as a college student once while walking home at night. It was common then.
When it came to dealing with the Chinese government and police brutality, there was nothing we could do. They had guns, while law-abiding citizens did not.
We could not vote. No elections back then. The party appointed all the officials. Remember the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989? Thousands of students were killed by our own soldiers, who followed orders from the top leaders in Beijing. The local residents supported the students but had no means to help them. What if the residents and students had had guns? What if there had been a militia in China at that time? History might have been different.
Even though things have changed a lot in China since the open-door policy, the political system is still fundamentally the same: one-party rule. After I went to law school, and later joined a law-school faculty, I was depressed to know that what we learned and taught in school and what was reality were such different things. The society ruled not by law but by men.
Citizens still cannot buy firearms today. I remember that when I traveled to Guangdong province for business in 1997 and 1998, the residents called the local police “gangsters.” Whenever the police showed up, the residents would hide.
After I joined the law-school faculty in Fudan University, I had to be careful about what I said in the classroom and during the party’s political-study time. My boss in law school even intruded into my private life, telling me that I received too many letters; I was too social. I should not go to my boyfriend’s parents’ house for dinner and spend the night.
I realized I could not really have the personal freedom I dreamed of if I stayed in China, so I decided to come over to the U.S.A. to study. It was a long and stressful process for me to leave. I went to the local security office to apply for my passport seven times and was treated as a deserter, with papers thrown at my face. My law school made me sign a document saying that I would return to my job in Shanghai after two years of graduate study or they would eliminate my position and send all of my papers to my hometown in Chengdu, where I would be forced to go when I returned. I was determined to leave and did not care what they made me sign.
I finally made it to America in 1988 with $100 in my pocket. The first ten years when I was in the U.S., I still had nightmares about being trapped in China by the government. I dreamed often that I had to dig a big hole in the ground, into the blue Pacific Ocean, so I could escape, jump into the ocean, and swim to the States.
Even when I went back to visit China in 1991 with my American husband, and we stayed at a friend’s apartment in Beijing, the police came to pound the door one night, wanting to check our papers. Someone must have reported to them that there was a foreigner in the neighborhood. I was pregnant with our first boy; we were in deep sleep after midnight when the pounding noise terrified me and brought all the childhood memories back.
My father was required to apply for a permit to let my husband stay in my parents’ home for a three-month visit. Everyone in China today has a resident ID. You cannot just move to anywhere you see fit without permission. You cannot even get married and have a baby without application and approval from your employer (work unit). Isn’t it interesting how statist governments everywhere use companies to control people?
It is scary when law-abiding citizens have no privacy and no means to defend themselves. One time I was in China on June 4, the anniversary of Tiananmen Square, for a business trip. I was in my friend’s car around midnight. Local police pulled us over to check our ID and search our car. They did not have to show any search warrant.
I tried so hard to come to the U.S. for personal freedom, including the freedom guaranteed by the Second Amendment: the right to keep and bear arms, which makes me feel like a free person, not a slave. I felt empowered when I finally held my own gun. For the first time in my life, I truly knew I was free.
I think the Founding Fathers of this country were very wise. They put that in the Constitution because they knew that a government could become either powerful or weak and that the citizens’ last defense is the ability to bear arms to protect themselves against tyranny and criminals. The guns are not just for sports, hunting, and collecting; it is our fundamental right to bear arms and use them for our self-defense.
Having previously lived under a tyranny, it seems clear to me that the U.S. government is going to try to infringe my Second Amendment right. What happened in China could happen in America. If the government can tell us what arms to bear, where to bear them, and how many shots you need to use to defend yourself, we might just become slaves. America is the land of the free and the last hope for human freedom. Do not give up. We have to be united and fight back for the sake of our children and grandchildren.
— Lily Tang Williams is an American citizen and a businesswoman in Parker, Colo. She wrote this article for the Independence Institute, a think tank in Denver.
They would have needed more than a few AK-47's.
OTOH, If they were muslim terrorists they would have Obama sending them some really good weapons.
Reading Lily’s fabulous story and looking at the pictures of the tanks reminds me of the old tired argument of lefties that goes something like “......well, uh, why do you need a machine gun or a thirty round clip.......why not just five rounds?” Or, “you don’t need a machine gun to kill a deer!” Answer: “Well, you leftist bastard, if you (government) have a machine guy, I need one!” If you (government) have a tank, I need one and so on........where does it stop? I don’t know. Like even Scalia says, “nukes???........maybe”. When asked, “he didn’t know and would have to think about it”.
There’s a fight coming guys/gals. America is different than Europe. We are not passivists. Like China, California is already banging on doors and confiscating guns. Apparently with impunity.
Sounds like New Jersey.
Thanks. That’s the picture that sprang to mind for me.
“Guns” in the hands of the people wouldn’t do much against that column. Except get the people killed.
The gentleman in the pic is insanely courageous, but the real issue was the unwillingness of the troops in the tanks to kill him or others of “the people.” Which is why the Party had to bring in troops from another area to commit the massacre.
Pt
In every system of government, there are poor and there are rich. In communism, you have to be evil to be rich.
“And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?... The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If...if...We didn’t love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation.... We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.”
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Chinese and Americans are two different people with two different historical experience. When true conservatives say Americans are unique I agree. The US is a very blessed nation that we are found on a continent plentiful in resources, large landmass with two large ocean barriers. We never had a powerful predatory neighbor since the War of 1812 and Mexican War. Left unmolested Americans can develop liberty and not worry about security except in a time of war. Not too many nations begin with this geographical and strategic advantage. Private gun owners play a role in augmenting US forces via state militias, guns were a tool for self defense and law on the frontier (which developed a bulk of the American culture). Guns and gun owners were a positive experience for American society and politics. It was such a positive experience the Second Amendment is part and remain part of the US Constitution. Even today despite crime and mass shootings Americans still support gun ownership by a wide majority.
China’s experience with gun ownership is different. China went through national psychological trauma after the first two Opium Wars when they realize they were no longer the super power of the world that smaller technological advance European powers rule the world and were making demands from China on access of markets, troop bases and special concessions for their merchants who eventual live in China. Attempts to modernize and reform by officials in the Manchu Dynasty were crushed while Western powers were openly taking control of China and colonizing her. Eventually reformers had to rebel and overthrow the Manchu rulers and replace it with an American style republic with an exact copy of the US
Constitution in 1911. This was China’s first foray into democracy. The sad part was it failed. China’s wealth was concentrated in the upper 1 percent. Reform meant sharing knowledge, economic and political power with the remaining 99 percent poor China. It meant the upper class will not have dominance, privilege like the imperial past, it meant they will have social and economical competitors. Reform was opposed using the legal processes of democracy, and when that failed private armies were raised by the rich to take over regions and oppose gov policies. In other words democracy and private gun ownership equals chaos. Both kept China weak at a very critical moment in her history as foreign powers (Japan and Russia) grew bolder at China’s weakness to openly invade and colonize her. In the end it took a bitter/brutal Japanese invasion to unhinge China’s internal fighting which resulted in the Communist takeover of China. That was China’s experience with democracy and private gun ownership. Both help create chaos and national indecisiveness. Today the average Chinese want democracy to battle government corruption and abuse. Many in China are not ready to embrace overall democracy like the US because it will result in Tibet, Sanjing and Inner Mongolia (combined equal 60 percent of China land mass) declaring independence and separation from China. Given that fear, the last thing an average Chinese wants is every Chinese (including Mongolians, Tibetans, Uighurs) have access to private gun ownership. Would guns have prevented Tainamen Square? Maybe but it also would have caused civil wars and warlords before that.
Perhaps. But the families of those killed by the tanks can use their guns to kill the bureaucrats that are enslaving them.
Sound familiar? We seem to be at least halfway there!
Which raises the concern about UN, Russian and other foreign troops "training" in the U.S. They wouldn't hesitate like many of our own would.
Just what I've been saying all along; when the SHTF, first terminate the people GIVING THE ORDERS.
“In every system of government, there are poor and there are rich.”
Perhaps. However, most of the American “poor” would be considered “rich” in most of the rest of the world.
Of course, very, very few people in China ever had private guns. Even from 1911 to 1936, there were so few guns that the armies opposing the Japanese (just a tiny fraction of the population) often only had one gun for five people.
It is true that a gun culture has to be learned. I see many pictures of Chinese students being taught how to use guns by training with air rifles.
Perhaps this is something that can be built on for the future. I am doubtful, though. Once a people have been disarmed, any government is highly reluctant to allow them arms.
Racist/s
I have looked for references to the implementation of a copy of the American Constitution in the revolution of 1911 or anywhere in Chinese history, but have been unable to find any.
Could you please direct me to a source that references it?
Sun Yat Sen actually hired an American to help draft the Chinese Republic Constitution. The 1911 Republic of China constitution was based on the US one. There are a number of books written about Sun Yat Sen and fall of the Republic which degenerated into warlord period. He is esteemed by the Communist Chinese as well as the Nationalist Chinese. References to the 1911 Revolution written by the Communist will point out the necessity of the revolt against the Manchus and how it failed, nothing will be recorded on his attempts to recreate an American style Republic. The Nationalists will write about that aspect of the revolution and government.
Until the Chicoms and/or Han Chinese resolve those areas amicably, they won't sleep well, IMHO.
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