And they number at least in the hundreds of thousands.
Not only that, that hateful old ideology and statist mode, Maoism, appears to have made a comeback, in that the state has been recruiting ordinary folks to spy on everyone and tell on them for stuff.
Wouldn't you be pissed to learn that your neighbors are spying on you and telling the cops about everything you do that they think might be naughty?
Wearing red armbands with Olympic badges, the volunteers loiter near the entrance gates of their neighbourhood. They scrutinize every visitor and report to the police if they see anyone unfamiliar or suspicious.
The volunteers of Hongxialu are just one cog in a vast machinery of surveillance in Beijing these days. Across the city, a network of 400,000 informants and volunteers has been mobilized to keep an eye out in their communities. The old Maoist system of neighbourhood committees, which had largely fallen into irrelevance in the past decade, is being revived again as a tool of social control.
When the last gold medal has been awarded and the athletes have left, this network of informers – along with an estimated 300,000 surveillance cameras and a strengthened security apparatus – will remain as perhaps the biggest legacy of the historic Beijing Olympics.
In many ways, it is a return to China's past. “The country's labyrinthine network of law-enforcement, censorship and surveillance apparatuses has reimposed a straitjacket over the populace,” says Willy Lam, a political analyst based in Hong Kong.
Oh, dear... I thought it couldn't possibly get any worse. Looks like I thought wrong!
Clearly, the Communist Party is maximally paranoid. Those in charge obviously suffer from debilitating mental disorder.
Say, you know, this reminds me of the Liberal Fascists of Canada's "human rights" commissions. The only difference is that they won't blow your head off, won't pull out your fingernails, won't harvest your organs for millions in profit, unlike the bloodthirsty Communists. But the underlying, fundamental mental disorder and delusionality of the Liberal Fascists of Canada and the Communists of China is all too familiar.
