The CCP’s “Low Human Rights Advantage”

(Minghui.org) Twelve years after the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) rolled out its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) to push its ideology and economic influence on a global scale, the harsh reality of its “low human rights advantage” has become clear.

Incidents Caused by the Belt and Road Initiative

Myanmar is at the intersection of the BRI’s “China-Indochina Peninsula Economic Corridor” and the “Bangladesh-China-India-Myanmar Economic Corridor.” Thailand is also in an important strategic position. China and Thailand have worked closely since the CCP proposed the BRI in 2013. According to the CCP, nearly 700 Chinese companies had invested in Thailand by 2023.

On March 28, 2025, a 7.7-magnitude earthquake struck Myanmar and affected Thailand. The new Thai National Audit Office building was jointly built by Thailand and the China Railway 10th Engineering Group, with the latter responsible for the overall construction. The building collapsed at the epicenter, killing three workers and trapping 43 people in the ruins. The main structure of the building was capped last year, which means the skeleton of the building was done. This is the only high-rise building that collapsed in Bangkok, Thailand, during the March 28 earthquake.

In Europe, Serbia (in the Balkan Peninsula) actively cooperated with the BRI. On November 1, 2024, the roof of the Novi Sad railway station in northern Serbia collapsed, killing at least 14 people. The project was jointly completed by China Railway and China Communications Construction.

Moving south to Africa, Kenya is an important channel that the BRI used to enter the region and a country where the BRI China-Africa cooperation is showcased. On June 26, 2017, the SIGIRI Bridge in Kenya collapsed, injuring at least 27 people. The project was built by the China Railway 10th Engineering Group.

This string of incidents shows the consequences of working with the CCP. Such poor-quality construction–often referred to as “tofu dregs” in Chinese–has not only harmed Chinese people but also people in other countries.

“A Contagious Process of Corruption”

Zheng Gang, who participated in the construction of a 28-kilometer highway in 2017 in Reshui Town, Rucheng County, Hunan Province, China, shared some details after he left China and moved to the United States. In order to prevent flash floods, two standard two-meter-long concrete drainage pipes were originally planned. But the construction unit took a chance and replaced them with four thinner 60-centimeter pipes. The area experienced a flash flood and the highway did not drain quickly, resulting in more than two meters of water accumulating on the road. When two cars drove through, they fell into the water, and the two drivers died.

Why were wide pipes replaced with narrow ones? Zheng said that officials at all levels were taking bribes and almost every department required kickbacks in order to advance the project. After the incident, higher officials issued several orders to cover it up.

Zheng worked in construction for 30 years and is familiar with engineering standards. The budget for this highway project was 120 million yuan, but when the highway was completed, it cost 270 million yuan, with 150 million yuan embezzled. The amount embezzled exceeded the actual cost of the project. This is fairly common in China.

Zhang said, “Some of my colleagues and friends worked on BRI projects. It’s exporting China’s fraud, shoddy goods, and corruption to foreign countries. It’s not an exaggeration to say that the BRI is a contagious process of corruption. Under China’s corruption culture, those involved can quickly be corrupted in less than six months, which is similar to the situation in China. On the surface, the BRI is exporting projects, but in fact it’s exporting CCP culture.”

If the Myanmar earthquake had happened a year later, when the building in Bangkok that collapsed was filled with hundreds or even thousands of people, how many would have died?

No Respect for Life

What is life in the eyes of communists? “Life is the mode of existence of protein bodies,” wrote Friedrich Engels in 1883. When a person dies, it is only that a pile of proteins has changed its form of existence. Communism discards the traditional concepts in Eastern and Western cultures of man being created by the divine and having inherent rights. The divine connection of human beings has become a feudal superstition. In the eyes of atheists, only what can be seen is believed, and what cannot be seen is not believed. Where is God? Where is the law of reincarnation?

But Plato once said, “What is visible is the shadow of the invisible.” If a person believes in the divine, then he or she will feel guilty after doing wrong and worry about facing divine or karmic retribution. Without this belief, however, people can be more easily driven to harm others without any scruples.

Mao Zedong said, “A thorough materialist is fearless.” Since the CCP usurped power, 80 million Chinese people have died abnormally. However, even though many Chinese people understand this historical fact, they still think that the lives lost are just numbers.

Some may see China’s high-speed rail, cheap goods, and fast growth as the result of efficiency and speed under a socialist regime. But the social cost, corruption, waste, abuse of power, and contempt for life paint quite a different picture. The information the CCP presents to the world is heavily censored and manipulated. How did this prosperity really come about? What truths are outsiders not allowed to see?

Behind the Scenes

People in other countries may not know that China’s high-speed rail, high-rise buildings, and cheap goods are built by cheap labor in the form of migrant workers. Some academics call this the CCP’s “low human rights advantage.” Under the iron curtain of communism, little is known about China’s migrant workers:

Farmers are the main source of cheap labor in China

Most people think child laborers and slave laborers are deprived of their personal freedom and forced to work in prisons or other places. In fact, Chinese farmers are the lowest level of labor. After they are considered to have lost their value, only illness and death await them.

Official statistics released by the CCP show that the suicide rate among the elderly in rural China is four to five times the world average, and many commit suicide when they become ill.

The pension for Chinese farmers is only between 100 and 200 yuan per month, while the average pension for urban workers is more than 3,000 yuan. When farmers get old, they can no longer support themselves, let alone pay to have serious illnesses treated.

Around 2014, Liu Yanwu, a sociologist at Wuhan University, visited more than 40 villages in 11 provinces in China, including Hubei, Shandong, Jiangsu, Shanxi, Henan, and Guizhou, over a six-year period. She made the chilling finding that the suicide rate among farmers was so high that villagers had grown numb to it.

In one example, a son worked away from home and asked for a seven-day leave to return home after he learned that his father was seriously ill. When his father’s condition improved, the son asked him: “Are you going to die or not? I only asked for seven days’ leave, including time for your funeral.” The father committed suicide.

In another case, an elderly man in Jingshan County, Hubei Province, put on clean clothes and sat in the middle of his home, burning paper money for himself in a brazier while drinking pesticide. When the paper money was halfway burned, the man lost consciousness. When people found him, he was no longer breathing. The villagers said, “He was afraid that after he died, his children wouldn’t burn paper money for him, so he did it himself.”

As horrific as this sounds, similar stories are taking place in rural China. After decades of brainwashing by the CCP, the kindness and morality that were part of China’s traditional culture have long disappeared. Taking the lives of parents is impossible even in the animal world, but it is actually happening in China under the CCP’s control.

Jia Shuhua from Dalian Medical University once found through an investigation that “90% of people who committed suicide in rural areas never sought any help, and the official assistance received by the families of the suicides through national and government channels is almost zero.”

A paper published in BMC Public Health in April 2020 showed that the incidence of catastrophic health expenditure among middle-aged and elderly people in China (20.3%) was higher than that in other low and middle-income countries, such as Colombia (9.6%) and India (7%). The incidence of catastrophic health expenditure for rural and urban households in Iran was 0.5%-14.3% and 0.48%-13.27%, respectively.

Data from the CCP’s Xinhua News Agency in October 2020 showed that among China’s registered poor households, more than 42% were impoverished or returned to poverty due to illness, which is the main cause of poverty among the rural population.

Farmers, who make up almost half of China’s population, are the main labor force that builds high-speed rails, cities, and cheap commercial housing. However, after leaving the construction site or factory, they become an abandoned or “useless” population. Chinese farmers are treated as just tools, and the CCP does not care if they survive.

Socialist unified purchase: a social nightmare, not an institutional advantage

Socialism is a nightmare for farmers. Since the 1950s, the CCP has implemented unified purchasing and marketing. Farmers are often forced to turn in grain. “Officials in my village have forced people into starvation and death. All our food rations were confiscated, and they still don’t believe us. In cold weather, people go shirtless … they couldn’t stand it, so they hanged themselves,” said Xu Jieyuan, who lived in Wenzhen Town in Zhejiang Province in 1958. “I think the unified purchase and sale of grain is very left-wing. It has killed many people.” But such remarks were attacked, and Xu was targeted during the Anti-Rightist campaign.

Another person said, “The people’s government wants every grain of food... but we cannot afford three meals of porridge. Chiang Kai-shek [leader of the Nationalist government that ruled China before the CCP] is supposed to be bad [according to the CCP’s propaganda], but we didn’t have to worry about three meals of white rice.” The CCP also targeted this person.

Another person the regime attacked in Shandong Province said, “Workers earn 40 to 50 yuan a month, and farmers earn 40 to 50 yuan a year. I say firmly that this is not superior.”

With no freedom of movement and insufficient wages to support themselves, farmers were essentially imprisoned in concentration camps. This was the real situation of Chinese farmers 70 years ago. The income gap between them and urban residents was 15 to 30 times. This was the case as early as the beginning of the CCP’s rule in China. Since the 1950s, the CCP’s enslavement of Chinese farmers has never changed and has not stopped.

Glamorous packaging by “big foreign propaganda”

Why do people no longer have sympathy for this suffering? It all stems from the CCP’s “big foreign propaganda,” clever packaging, and use of state-run media to broadcast the CCP’s glamorous side, while these real human tragedies and humble lives are never mentioned.

Instead, the cheap goods exported by China led the West to believe that no matter how bad the CCP is, the goods they produce are of good quality and low price, and therefore communism still has its merits.

By taking advantage of its cheap labor, the CCP made the West reliant and became an indispensable link in the world’s supply chain.

However, one of the CCP’s exports produces a deadly lethal substance in North America–fentanyl.

Drugs and Weapons

The Economist magazine found that although the CCP claimed in January this year to have shut down some drug-related websites, online transactions of chemicals are still rampant. A chemical trading platform in Shanghai is one example. It openly advertised “safe delivery to Mexico and the United States” and promoted the banned fentanyl precursor 1-boc-4-AP. Reuters reported that it took only $3,600 to buy raw materials and equipment to make 750,000 fentanyl tablets (worth about $3 million) from an online Chinese seller.

The April 2024 report of a U.S. House of Representatives bipartisan committee pointed out the key problem: Although the CCP has strong internet monitoring capabilities, it only cracks down on drug crimes when they involve domestic interests. Meanwhile, it uses the fentanyl issue as a propaganda tool to criticize the “degeneration” of Western democratic countries.

According to 2023 data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the number of drug overdose deaths in the United States exceeded 100,000 for three consecutive years, of which synthetic opioids accounted for 68%. Katherine Keyes, a drug abuse expert at Columbia University in the U.S., said the number was devastating. “This is a number of overdose deaths that we have never seen in this country,” reported the Associated Press.

Fentanyl has become a bargaining chip for the CCP. As long as the CCP exists, the fentanyl crisis will continue.

The CCP’s hostility toward mankind

The Communist Party has no bottom line—it disregards life, eliminates faith, and seeks to control everything. It uses atheism to destroy traditional culture and morality, controls people with violence and lies, and enslaves the lower class in exchange for superficial prosperity.

The CCP not only controls the Chinese people but also transmits its twisted values to the world through the BRI and “unrestricted warfare” that involves business, technology, consumption, culture, and other fields. The weaponization of fentanyl is just one example.

Summary

The CCP is sworn to oppose traditional values such as the principles of Truthfulness-Compassion-Forbearance. Its so-called “systemic advantages” and “low human rights advantages” are just lies used to deceive the world. Countries that adopt this system may enjoy short-term glory like the CCP, but the price they pay is long-term: they lose the people’s support, the system becomes a corrupt circle of interest groups, and the government covers up the truth.

Those who adopt the CCP’s anti-human ideology will also endanger their own future. The CCP is already receiving karmic retribution in many ways for persecuting Truthfulness, Compassion, and Forbearance. If nations do not return to traditional values, consequences more serious than earthquakes and building collapses may soon occur. Only by seeing through the CCP’s mask to its true nature can people and countries avoid the harms of Marxism, socialism, and communism, and only then can these evils finally exit the stage of history. What i’s needed to rebuild China is traditional values such as the principles of Truthfulness-Compassion-Forbearance, not the CCP’s survival.