In mainland Chinese society under CCP rule, horrifying and evil crimes have never ceased. Every society has its share of evil, but the extreme evil crimes that occur on the mainland leave people not only outraged but also helpless and hopeless — a stark contrast to most societies elsewhere in the world. Several recent evil crimes that outraged the mainland public, for instance, were suppressed through the CCP's Tai Chi-like, soft-handed methods of control, leaving public opinion unable to move so much as a finger. As a result, the true face of the wrongdoing is never revealed, and the public's grief and outrage, however intense, soon fades away into silence.

The case of the trafficked woman chained by the neck in Fengxian County, Xuzhou, who had borne eight children, triggered a tsunami of public demand across the mainland for the truth and for the perpetrators to be punished. But the CCP responded, first, by handing out minor, vaguely labeled punishments to a few people; second, by harshly and brutally persecuting those who investigated and exposed the case on their own, and by pressuring those online who sought the truth and voiced outrage and condemnation; and third, by repeating already-exposed, obvious lies over and over, brazenly adopting the attitude of ‘I'm lying to you and there's nothing you can do about it.’ Over the course of more than a month — during which the ‘chained woman’ drew even more attention than the concurrent Beijing Winter Olympics — the case was ultimately, unwillingly and helplessly, silenced under the CCP's suppression and persecution.

Other cases that, like the ‘chained woman,’ drew intense attention from all of mainland society and even the international community include: the four women in Tangshan beaten by a gang of thugs, who to this day remain unaccounted for — even their names have vanished; the roughly 400,000 depositors in some Henan banks, holding a combined 40 billion yuan, whose withdrawals were blocked by the banks on absurd pretexts and left unresolved, with authorities assigning them ‘red health codes’ to bar them from traveling and prevent them from seeking redress; and children born in violation of the birth-planning policy who were seized by family-planning officials under the brazen label of ‘social redistribution’ — a case whose deeper investigation revealed that so-called welfare institutions run by the CCP were selling seized infants and toddlers at high prices to adoptive families in Western countries, among other examples. Every one of these evils, once exposed, ignited a wave of furious public condemnation and denunciation — and every single one was ultimately silenced through a combination of CCP persecution, pressure, and soft-handed manipulation.

Why is the CCP always able to use its practiced mix of political tactics to silence these horrifying crimes that leave people speechless with outrage? One of the thugs involved in the Tangshan beating case let slip part of the secret. Facing a tidal wave of public condemnation and calls for punishment, he sneered that he had already spent 600,000 yuan to ‘take care of’ the matter, and that the online condemnation and appeals were nothing more than the last kicks of grasshoppers after autumn frost. And sure enough, events bore out this thug's boast: within just a few days, the public's outrage had been smoothed over by the police. This vividly illustrates how deep and far-reaching the collusion between police and gangsters is under CCP rule, and how helpless public outrage is in the face of such bullying.

Of course, evil this brazen could not run rampant in the open without the CCP shielding, tolerating, and even deliberately nurturing it. Using gangster methods is one hallmark of CCP rule. Scholars who study the CCP's techniques of governance have a specific term for this: ‘authorized wrongdoing’ — meaning that the CCP regime, in pursuit of its goals, will stop at nothing, tacitly permitting or even encouraging subordinates to break the law to achieve results, in effect authorizing officials below to commit evil freely without being held accountable. For example, during the period of strict family-planning enforcement, it was commonplace for birth-control officials to kill infants, abuse mothers, and seize property — crimes that, far from being investigated and punished under the law, instead earned them lavish commendations, awards for meritorious service, and brilliant official careers. This kind of ‘authorized’ evil is never confined to the scope of what was explicitly ‘authorized,’ nor limited to the period when the goal is being pursued; it inevitably spills over into every sphere of society, with consequences reaching immeasurably into the future.

In fact, the CCP's rise and its seizure of power from the Republic of China depended entirely on rootless, disreputable lumpen-proletarians. Mao Zedong encouraged the lumpen-proletariat to ‘roll around on the ivory beds of landlords' daughters’ — beneath this understated phrase about ‘rolling around’ lay an incitement to every kind of filthy, base behavior. The hatred bred into the CCP's hybrid of Marxism-Leninism, and the behavior it produces at its core, runs directly counter to the moral and ethical norms China developed over thousands of years. Ordinary law-abiding people, before being throttled and brainwashed, would have shunned such behavior at all costs; only the lumpen-proletarians whom the CCP prized as instruments for achieving its goals could revel gleefully in such evil, running wild like demons. It was through unspeakably evil atrocities — land reform, the siege of Changchun, and the like — that the CCP was able to defeat the Republican government, which remained bound by traditional values.

Yet seventy years on, far from reforming itself after taking power, the CCP has come to use and rely on gangster tactics even more frequently. This is plain to see across the CCP's enforcement of family planning, taxation, demolitions, and land requisitions, as well as in how it handles citizen petitions and its all-out drive for ‘stability maintenance’ — collusion between officials and gangsters, and between police and criminals, has become an undeniable norm. Indeed, the CCP's need for and dependence on this arrangement exceeds the gangsters' need for the CCP: without the help of organized crime, the CCP would find it hard to control the situation, whereas organized crime can make its own living without depending on the CCP. This mutually dependent, symbiotic relationship between the CCP and criminal forces means that no matter how great a wave of public outrage rises up, once the CCP goes through its perfunctory motions of appeasement, that outrage is inevitably reduced to silence.