Kenneth R. Timmerman is a contributing editor for Reader's Digest and a frequent contributor to The American Spectator.
The Chinese Communist government in Peking has shrunk from nothing in its attempt to win the hearts and minds of U.S. lawmakers, from President Clinton down to members of Congress, whom they regularly invite on junkets to visit China's tourist spots and to witness the "economic miracle" of state-run capitalism. And Americans are gradually becoming aware of a much broader attempt by Peking to infiltrate American society, an effort that has taken a great leap forward during the Clinton-Gore administration. As chronicled in these pages, the Chinese have planted a top agent in the Commerce Department to obtain classified U.S. intelligence information and an inside preview of U.S. policy toward China. They've purchased entire U.S. defense plants closed at the end of the Cold War, and established thousands of U.S. trading companies to procure technology and serve as fronts for high-tech spying. They have tapped Wall Street's vast capital market to fund the corrupt enterprises of the Red Princelings and the People's Liberation Army (PLA), borrowing billions of dollars from top U.S. retirement funds to float bond issues for the Bank of China and regional development banks owned by the Chinese government.
Peking has even set its sights on American children. A Florida theme park owned by the State Council of the People's Republic is designed to convince kids, and their unwitting parents, that the Communist dictatorship is simply heir to 5,000 years of imperial splendor. This park, a monument to the manifest destiny of a Greater China that has never existed, richly epitomizes the propaganda strategy of the Chinese government toward the United States.
On seventy-six acres of former ranch land in Kissimmee, Florida, just across the state highway from its more famous competitor Disney World, sits Florida Splendid China. I went to see it on a chilly winter afternoon, and as I wandered through the theme park's eerily empty landscapes (the other tourists having flocked to heated exhibits at Disney World and nearby Universal Studios), I was repeatedly struck by the craftsmanship and harmonious design of these miniature landscapes, temples, monuments. Buts one aspect of the layout was especially noteworthy: All the representations of Tibet, East Turkestan, and Mongolia were neatly placed outside the half-mile long replica of the Great Wall, the original of which had been built between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries to repel nomadic invaders. Although barbarian Mongols, Manchus, and Tibetans ruled over China for centuries, the miniature models at Florida Splendid China perpetuate the fantasy of eternal Chinese rule over the vast territory claimed today the Chinese Communist Party.
The park was conceived in the late 1980's by a Taiwanese American school teacher and real-estate developer, Josephine Chen, as a medium for cultural exchange between China and the United States. "My mom swore she'd never go back to China as long as the Communists were still in power:' recalls her 42-yearold son, George Chen. "But this was before Tiananmen, and things were loosening up. She really felt she could make a difference, and could give something back to the United States and to China for her own success. Mrs. Chen, now 74, traveled to China in 1988 and was welcomed by officials of a government agency called China Travel Services (Holdings) HK, or CTS for short. They gave her a grand tour of a soon-to-be-opened theme park dedicated to the glories of China's past and to its spectacular landscapes. Located in Shenzhen, on the mainland with close access to Hong Kong, Splendid China Miniature Scenic Spot was an immediate hit, welcoming more than three-and-a-half million visitors its first year and allowing CTS to recoup its entire $l00-million investment.
It took two years to negotiate an agreement with CTS, which is controlled by the Overseas Chinese Affairs Office, the main propaganda arm of the Chinese Communist State Council. Under the agreement, Mrs. Chen provided the land and management services for the park, while the Chinese supplied the building materials, the architects, and the personnel. CTS brought in expert masons who laid more than six million miniature bricks to build the copy of the Great Wall. They molded 30-foot high replicas of giant Buddhas, and set up an entire lumber mill to manufacture the delicate tongue-and-groove beams and planks needed to build hundreds of miniature towns, palaces, and temples. To supervise the construction, Mrs. Chen convinced her son George to abandon his successful computer manufacturing business and become president of the new venture. "I worked l6-hour days," he recalls. "At the peak of construction, which took only two years, we had 130 workers from China living in a custom-built trailer park across the street that for them had all the trappings of a luxury hotel. We brought in two chefs from China, bought specialty foods and had the best Chinese restaurants in the area, just for our workers. I made it a point to buy each of them a season pass to Disney. We had a huge library of Chinese films in wide-screen video. And they had air-conditioning-for them, something unheard of but which they soon found they couldn't live without in the Florida heat." Chen recalls negotiating with the INS, to obtain temporary visas for the Chinese workers (who were required to be paid American union wages), and with the FBI, which expressed concerns that some of the laborers might have been tapped by the Chinese intelligence services to spy on nearby Cape Canaveral. As construction began in December 1991, so did the problems-not with the American authorities, but with the Chens' Chinese partners.
"The Chinese wanted us to buy black pine beams for the park exhibits." recalls Chen. "Imported from China, they cost $80 each. We found them here for $5 apiece. Since the plans called for thousands of these, we were talking about major economies." Another example was the dyestuff used to color concrete used in the exhibits. "The Chinese said they had a supplier who would provide the die for $75 per gallon. Each gallon was enough to die one-third cubic yard of concrete. I found U.S.-made powder dies that cost thirty cents a packet, and that would color three cubic yards each." There were dozens of other such cases. "Each time, the Chinese said they had a supplier back in China, who could give them a special deal. I won't say it was kickbacks. But clearly, their goal was not to get the job done in the most efficient or cost effective way.
Then there was the content of the park itself. The original Splendid China in Shenzhen featured one -fifteenth scale replicas of Chinese monuments such as the Forbidden City and Tiananmen Square, and spectacular landscapes such as the Stone Forest or the Lijiang river in dreamlike Guilan. Chen says he sought to erect a replica of the Statue of Democracy in the exhibit of Tiananmen Square -- the symbol of the pro-democracy movement brutally crushed in Tune 1989 "They croaked at that," he recalls. "Privately, they said that while they might agree, the project would get shot down by the Chinese government if we included it."
One of the supreme ironies of the park is the sheer number of Buddhist shrines among the exhibits, given that the Communists have systematically attempted to uproot religion, destroying temples, mosques, and monasteries, and slaughtering monks and nuns. In the 1:3 scale replica of the Longmen Grotto, two of the devotees of a female Buddha figure were reproduced with smashed faces. "We had a long discussion about that with CTS," Chen remembers. "The faces had been intact until Red Guards smashed them during the Cultural Revolution in 1969. The CTS people wanted to reproduce them intact, to avoid any political discussion. In the end, a panel of Chinese government historians was brought in, and even they agreed we couldn't remake history by giving them their faces back." By far the most controversial exhibit is a gigantic replica of the Potala Palace, the seat of the Tibetan government since the seventh century and home to the Dalai Lama since 1642-until he was forced into exile by Peking in 1959. It stretches majestically across an entire man-made mountain, giving off an unmistakable religious aura. Chen said he agreed to include it because it was "one of the most beautiful buildings in China's sphere of influence. You don't have to be a Tibetan Buddhist to find it simply awe-inspiring." Until recently, Florida Splendid China also included a Buddhist prayer carpet rolled up on the slope leading up to the palace, which tiny Tibetan monks would unroll if visitors inserted a quarter into the slot of an electronic command. The message was purely Communist: Monks would perform any service for money. After repeated protests by Tibetan Buddhists, the park management withdrew that part of the exhibit.
THE PLA STORMS TIBET
Nevertheless, including Tibet's Potala Palace in a theme park dedicated to the splendors of Chinese culture remains a highly provocative and ultimately political act. The United Nations has voted three resolutions condemning China's illegal occupation of Tibet, which began when Mao sent the first PLA units across Tibet's internationally-recognized borders in late 1949, only weeks after the success of China's Communist revolutionaries. Mao launched a full-scale invasion of Tibet the following year, overwhelming the 8,000 men of the Tibetan army.
Alarmed at the Communist invasion, the Tibetan National Assembly convened an emergency meeting and requested that the fourteenth Dalai Lama, then 15 years old, assume full authority as head of state, and that he leave the Tibetan capital Lhasa for a town near the border with India to ensure his personal safety. The Chinese annexed whole portions of the eastern part of the country to the neighboring Chinese provinces of Sichuan, Yunnan, and Gansu. The bulk of the Amdo region, together with a small area of Kham province, were split off to form a new province of the People's Republic called Qinghai.
In 1951, Mao forced a peace treaty on a captive Tibetan delegation in Peking intended to bestow legitimacy on the Chinese military occupation, and created the Tibet Autonomous Regional Government within the PRC. Tibetans launched a full-scale rebellion against the occupation in 1959, when the Dalai Lama fled to India, followed by some 80,000 of his people. An official Chinese Army intelligence report from 1960 admits that the PLA killed 87,000 Tibetan resistance fighters in Lhasa and the surrounding areas between March and October 1959 alone.
Following the exile of the Dalai Lama, international human-rights groups estimate that anywhere from 20 to 30 percent of Tibet's entire population was massacred by the Chinese. (The Dalai Lama's Office of Tibet conservatively estimates that just over 1 million Tibetans -- out of a total population of 6 million -- have been killed by the Chinese during the occupation.) Once the crackdown began, Mao ordered the PLA to attack the centers of Tibetan Buddhism, since the Dalai Lama had become a symbol of resistance for Tibetans.
The new Communist rulers forced monks and nuns to copulate in public on the streets of Lhasa, according to contemporaneous accounts. The Tibetan Government in Exile claims that Chinese troops destroyed more than a thousand monasteries in 1959 Chinese government statistics paint an even more gruesome picture, with the cold-blooded precision only a totalitarian regime can muster. In a survey on "population changes," published in Peking in 1989, the Peking government revealed that the number of "functioning monasteries and temples" in Tibet had dropped from 2,611 in 1958, to just )70 in 1960, while the clerical population had been diminished over the same period from 114,100 to 18,104-clinical terms for describing mass murder. By 1976, according to official Chinese government statistics, only eight monasteries and nunneries remain in the whole of Tibet.
This year marks four decades since the bloody suppression of the Tibetan independence movement and the flight into exile of the Dalai Lama. As it happens, it also marks 50 years since Mao announced the "liberation" of the independent states of Tibet and East Turkestan, and sent the PLA across their borders to begin a half-century of military occupation and repression; 30 years since the Red Guards ravaged the Republic of Inner Mongolia during the Cultural Revolution, slaughtering 50,000 Mongols while injuring and torturing over a million more; 20 years since the birth of the pro-democracy movement throughout China; and 10 years since the Tiananmen Square massacres.
As China's leaders celebrate 50 years of Communist rule this year, they no doubt would prefer to forget those more somber anniversaries. For Peking, l999 is the Year of All Dangers. It began with the arrest of Chinese intellectuals seeking to form an opposition party, and in just a few short weeks led to the harshest crackdown on political dissidents since Tiananmen.
China's latest actions fly in the face of promises made to the Clinton administration to show greater tolerance of political opposition, and directly flout a written pledge only six months earlier to accept the conditions of democratic discourse of the International Covenants on Civil and Political Rights. The reason for today's harsh actions is simple: China's rulers understand that the conquered peoples under their control are straining at the yoke, and they fear that the string of anniversaries set to occur this year could prove the inspiration for their liberation.
PROTESTERS AT THE PARK
"I think what happened in Tibet was close to genocide," says George Chen. But after consulting with a panel of historians sent over by the Chinese government to oversee the planning of Florida Splendid China, he says he came to the conclusion that including a model of the Potala Palace would "serve as a forum for people to express their concern with the behavior of the Chinese Communist govemment. Without it we would not have had the protests or the public discussions." Indeed, the inclusion of the Palace--and of several other exhibits from the formerly independent states of Inner Mongolia and East Turkestan--has inspired calls for boycotting the park.
One week before Florida Splendid China opened its doors to the public in December 1993 CTS bought out Chen and his mother. "It was clear our Chinese government partners preferred to have absolute control,' Chen said. 'They didn't want me around on opening day." The reason was simple, Chen believes. CTS had invested in Florida Splendid China on orders from China's State Council, and intended the park to serve as a vehicle for Communist propaganda. They didn't want to risk having a Taiwanese-American partner around who might spoil the effect by talking democracy or human rights.
If Chen and his mother had wanted the park to showcase China's ancient culture and its values, and suggest that the Communist regime was not eternal, the Chinese government sought to convey precisely the opposite message. So they put the squeeze on the Chens almost from the start, first by trying to micromanage the park's construction, and in the end by simply buying them out. By the time the park was getting spruced up for the opening, it was clear to Chen that CTS was determined to get rid of them and was, in effect, putting its "final offer" on the table. He feared that if he turned them down the family's entire investment would be at risk.
The park held a private viewing the day before it officially opened that was attended by 2,400 guests and dignitaries, including Chinese Foreign Minister Qian Qichen and three other top Chinese Communist officials. Messages of congratulation, reproduced in the park promotional brochure, were sent by President Jiang Zemin (then Secretary General of the Chinese Communist Party), Premier Li Peng, and former PRC President Yang Shang Kun.
The Chinese also assembled an "organizing committee" of prominent Americans they hoped would provide them with political cover, although few if any of those named in the Florida Splendid China official literature ever showed up. The committee included former President Richard Nixon (at the personal request of the PRC ambassador to Washington); Florida Governor Lawton Chiles; former Secretary of State Alexander Haig (who represents major U.S. companies seeking to expand their business in China); and Rep. Bill McCollum, who represents the district where the park is located. (McCollum's office says he never attended the opening and has no recollection of having endorsed the park.)
A different group of guests-- uninvited and unwelcome showed up for the opening: Outside the front gates, Tibetan Buddhist monks wearing traditional saffron robes carried signs denouncing China's illegal occupation of their homeland. They were accompanied by Jack Churchward, a former U.S. Navy technician who converted to Tibetan Buddhism and now heads the Committee against Communist Chinese Propaganda in Clearwater, Florida. Churchward claims that a park security guard informed him that one of the visiting Chinese officials asked the chairman of CTS to call the police to have them removed. When told that was not possible, Churchward says, "He told the head of Park Security to have us killed." (The current director of Florida Splendid China, Sonny Yang, denies the charge.)
According to the Orlando Sentinel, the protesters "have dogged the attraction for years....They charge that, behind the pastoral scenes and tiny replicas of Chinese landmarks, is a propaganda effort by the Chinese government to polish its image and whitewash its mistreatment of minority groups." The protesters have also set up a Web site detailing their case (www.caccp.org/park), and are calling on the Department of Justice to take action against the U.S. company set up to operate the park--arguing that the company serves as the unregistered representative of a foreign government, in violation of federal law.
Sonny Yang dismisses the possibility of changing or removing any exhibits in exchange for ending the protests. "Florida Splendid China is not a political statement," he insists. "We're here to run a business, not to make politics." Business could be better. The park's first three years were rocked by protests, which attracted local media attention and helped keep attendance low. That period also saw some 42 Chinese performers--brought over for displays of acrobatics, traditional dance, and music-request political asylum in the U.S. One of these defectors wrote to a local central-Florida paper in January 1995 that management was holding the performers against their will, preventing them from meeting outsiders or from traveling outside the park.
That has all changed, says Sonny Yang, who came to Florida in March 1996 from the CTS branch office in Hong Kong. "I don't know why those people left. Since I've been here, no one has left. They have two days off per week and can travel wherever they like." (In fact, the dancers and acrobats perform six nights a week, and include three children under the age of 12.)
The early years of Florida Splendid China also saw a stream of official Chinese government delegations come to Kissimmee for propaganda tours and for surprise "inspections" --including, in October 1996, a tour bus bearing diplomatic license plates traced back to the Chinese embassy in Washington, D.C. (According to a U.S. intelligence source, CTS officials were seen at the White House just before the bus tour, handing out free trips to Florida Splendid China to National Security Council staffers. Repeated calls to the NSC for comment weren't returned.) George Chen, who has continued to follow the park's ups and downs, claims that top Chinese government officials still seek to place their sons and daughters on the payroll, a practice he says began when work first started in late 1991.
Churchward's group has written park management repeatedly, requesting they change exhibits that refer to minorities and to the occupied countries of Tibet, Inner Mongolia, and East Turkestan as if they were happy parts of China. In addition to the Potala Palace, the group objects to the inclusion of replicas of the Mausoleum of Ghengis Khan, the Mongol emperor who conquered China (and much of the rest of the world) in the thirteenth century; the Id Kah Mosque, which is located in the East Turkestan city of Kashgar and is one of the best known in the Muslim world; and the Tomb of Xiang Fei, the widow of a slain Uighur king, Apak Hoja.
The Xiang Fei tomb provides a clear example of how the Chinese Communist planners were seeking to "rewrite his tory," George Chen believes. In the caption on display in the park, the tomb is said to have been built by the Qing Dynasty Emperor Qianlong, who took Xiang Fei as a concubine after slaying her husband in battle. The Emperor was so taken by her "wondrous bodily fragrance" that he built a splendid tomb in her memory, the caption reads, informing viewers that the name Xiang Fei means "fragrant Imperial Concubine."
That story is simply a lie, according to Chen and to Ablajan Layli Naman, head of the International Taklamakan Uighur Human Rights Association. The building where Xiang Fei was buried was actually built by Uighurs as the tomb of Apak Hoja's father, more than 70 years prior to the Chinese government claim, and contains no fewer than 72 members of the Kashkar ruling family--but not a single Chinese. Xiang Fei never became the concubine of the Chinese emperor; rather, she committed suicide shortly after her husband was slain in battle in order to prevent her own capture by the Chinese. "The tomb of Apak Hoja is an expression of national resistance," Layli Naman says.
As for the Id Kah mosque, the park claims it was built by the Chinese in 1789, when in reality it was built more than 300 years earlier by residents of Kashgar, in 1442. "Why are they trying to appropriate our history?" Naman asks. His group has protested the inclusion of the mosque, which he calls an "East Turkestani religious icon," because it gives the impression that the PRC looks benevolently toward its Muslim minority when in reality it has conducted a systematic 50-year campaign of repression again it. In 1996, the PLA put down pro-independence riots that had spread throughout East Turkestan, killing dozens of protesters by official accounts. The Chinese government refers to the Uighur independence movement as "splittists" -- the same term it uses for the Dalai Lama and his followers. It fears that ethnic and religious rights movements will lead to the break-up of the People's Republic of China, just as the Soviet Union was broken up in 1991.
PROPAGANDA MISSION
By all accounts, Florida Splendid China has been a commercial flop. Sonny Yang admits that they average a scant 400 to 500 entries per day but insists they began making money last year after repaying the initial $100 million investment. George Chen believes that's a stretch. "The Chinese government continues to pump in fresh money for maintenance and salaries. They can't allow the Park to fail, because that would mean losing face. They send money whenever it is needed."
So why spend all that hard currency to maintain a failing theme park in the backyard of giants Disney, Universal Studios, and Seaworld, each of which banks tens of thousands of entries on an average day. First of all, to "exemplify Sino-U.S. economic and technical cooperation and our abilities to productively interact with one another," the park's Chinese founder, Ma Chi Man, explained in a promotional brochure. The park is "the eternal symbol of Sino-U.S. friendship," he gushed. More significant, perhaps, was his desire for the park to "tell the story of the Chinese people." That's where the inclusion of exhibits on subjugated minorities and occupied lands becomes important.
In previously secret minutes of the 1993 Beijing Propaganda Conference obtained by the International Campaign for Tibet, the strategy of the Chinese Communist Party toward ethnic minorities and occupied territories is made crystal clear:
"With regard to the attacks by the West and the Dalai [Lama] clique and their frequent activities, our external propaganda should launch offensives. We should expand our spheres of influence, in particular, we should infiltrate our propaganda into the mainstream life of the West. Firstly, we should continue to send Tibetan scholars and Tibetan singing and dancing troupes abroad to lecture and perform. Secondly, relevant embassies and consulates should aim at public opinion and the activities of the Dalai Clique in the countries they are stationed and utilize speeches, picture exhibitions, special articles and other forms to carry out propaganda work, so as to win over officials and people of those countries. Thirdly, TV programs for external broadcasting should include programs about Tibet. We should broadcast to Europe and America so that our propaganda can directly reach audiences of the Western countries."
Cultural exchanges, dancing troupes, exhibits - that is exactly the mission of Florida Splendid China. The goal is to present smiling peasants, industrious artisans, and spectacular scenery - all as an integral part of one unified China.
GOING TO DISNEY WORLD
The Chinese government also offers images of smiling Mongolian horsemen and other docile minorities at Disney World's international showcase, known as Epcot. An exhibit in Epcot's China pavillion called "Land of Many Faces" (prepared with the help of the Yunnan Provincial Museum in the mainland city of Kunming).highlights four Chinese minorities, the Miai, Naxi, Yi, and Mongols, "to offer a window into the many cultures of China's ethnic groups. The propaganda message is only slightly more heavy-handed in a 360 degree film spectacular of Chinese landscapes, narrated by the holographic image of an 8th century Chinese poet. From Mongolian yurts, where the poet is offered tea by smiling tribesmen, the scene changes to Peking's Forbidden city, where the message becomes more openly political. "Gone are the warlords, the landlords, and emperors," the smiling poet says. The former Imperial Palace "is now a special place for all Chinese." Similarly, street scenes of desperate poverty from the market place in the capital city of the Province of Xinkiang (occupied East Turkestan), are accompanied by gay music, presenting the theme of the contented peasants again. Disney appears to have learned from Florida Splendid China's travails, and carefully made no reference to Tibet. But Peking's message was as clear as ever.
TEACH AMERICA'S CHILDREN WELL
A key part of Florida Splendid China's marketing strategy is the outreachprogram to American school children. The park sends out promotional mailings all over the country, offering special discounts to school groups and teachers. "We get tens of thousands of kids coming to the park each year," says marketing director Kristie Joyce. "We offer them guided tours, and let them bring their own lunch and eat in the park. It is definitely a major part of the Park's activity to attract school children." You can be sure they don't get a history lesson on the People's Republic of China during their visit.
Field trips sponsored by public schools "implies legitimacy and approval and State and local government," says Jack Churchward. "They are trying to brainwash young kids into believing that places such as Tibet, East Turkestan, and Inner Mongolia are part of China, when in fact they are occupied territories that make up two-thirds of the territory of the PRC. If the Chinese Communist government can convince people that these areas are Chinese, then half the job is done."
Churchward's committee has tried to counter the park's propaganda by appealing directly to Florida school boards and teachers associations. In 1995, they convinced the Pinellas County Teachers Association to enact a ban on using public money for field trips to Florida Splendid China. Churchward says this didn't phase park officials who were "willing to snub the 7th largest school district in the state of Florida - and the 23rd largest in the U.S. - in order to maintain their signs. That shows that the park's message is more important than income," Churchward adds. In April 1996, the Florida Teaching Professionals-National Education Association State Conference in Orlando passed a resolution banning personal or school trips to Florida Splendid China for its members, recommending that the ban remain in place until the exhibit on Tibet was removed or until China "recognizes the sovereignty of the Nation of Tibet."
Confronted with these disputes, Kristie Joyce has nothing to say. Asked if she is aware that Tibet and East Turkestan were invaded by the Chinese Communist government and remain under military occupation, or that China has been condemned in the United Nations repeatedly for its occupation of Tibet, she finally answers: "I'm not going to comment on what I'm personally aware of or not."
In one of the park's souvenir shops, American employee Ray Weeks showed similar ignoranced as he gushed about the beauty and peacefulness of the park. "This is an intellectual's paradise," Weeks said. "It's not meant for people looking for thrill rides like Twister." When told about the military occupation of Tibet and East Turkestan, Weeks said: "That's news to me, but I intend to find out more." He certainly won't find it by touring Florida Splendid China, where the only message is that of an eternal China, at peace with itself, living in harmony with its subject minorities.