Kathryn Colucci

Coronavirus: Beginning of the End for Communism in China? (Newsmax Article)

Feb
11

During the presidential primaries of 2016, I was invited to a faculty dinner whose purpose was to host an editor of a major national newspaper. I found myself amongst a group of left-wing academics and students who represented the vast supermajority of the room.

Amongst the general horror felt by most as Donald Trump began to rack up election victories from the Republican side, a question was posed for dinner discussion: “What will be the major headline in 50 years?”

The majority of answers broke down into variations of an Earth ravaged by climate destruction, nuclear war, and big data manipulation. I began to laugh as I thought how the answers matched the personalities of their political inclinations: humorless at best, foreboding and dark at their worst.

When it fell upon me to deliver my pearl of wisdom, I glibly declared, “Not to burst the dystopian fantasies that we have all built here, but the major headline in 50 years will be a democratic China with which the United States is negotiating a military alliance with.” It goes without saying that the room fell silent in shock and disbelief.

In the early 2000s, I had been presenting the idea that China had just as much of a chance of national implosion as becoming a type of economic wunderkind of the early 21st century.

Both of these thoughts are converging. China, especially the Communist Party, is quickly losing runway to land their ideologies, policies and economic expansion. It has been decades since Chinese communist ideology was anything more than a rump placeholder for any sense of national identity or ethical behavior.

However, their world has become darker. Not only have they failed to meet the magical 8% growth rate of GDP that was always thought to be the price to purchase a compliant population, but they have suffered defeats over the Taiwan elections, international condemnation over Uighur “re-education camps” in Xinjiang, trade conflict with the United States, excessive violence usage in the Hong Kong protests, and finally, their latest catastrophic handling of the coronavirus.

With global deaths from coronavirus topping 1,000, far above that of the SARS outbreak from 2002 and 2003, the Chinese government has exhibited classic tactics of dystopian plotlines: They have manipulated the number of infected and dead since the virus’s initial onslaught; Chinese journalists covering the crisis have disappeared; Dr. Li Wenliang who warned about the virus back in December 2019, was detained and punished for “spreading rumors.”

Then there are the mysterious circumstances surrounding Dr. Li’s death. Social media posts show panicked citizens barricaded into their homes by authorities, while others are forcibly dragged from their homes. A woman was shown crying on her balcony pleading for help for her dying husband. One particularly disturbing image shows a couple thrown into a windowless, airless metal container while a little boy, off-camera, watched and asked what was happening.

It has yet to be seen how the coronavirus saga will unfold before it is relegated into the history books as a modern global pandemic. A major question remains: How many people will die from the virus and what percentage in quarantine zones will die from starvation and neglect reminiscent of Mao’s famine years?

For mainland Chinese, however, the question they absolutely will ask is, will we continue to tolerate this form of government, and will we allow it to consume our children? 

Accurate archival material of the Mao years may be hard to come by, and indeed, scholars in academia continue to argue whether he was the liberating leader of a Great Leap Forward, or an agent of evil.

But in this information age, Mao’s Communist legacy, as seen through today’s Chinese government, is made indisputable in its tactics, intentions and treatment of its own people.

For over 70 years, this Communist legacy has failed to grasp the concept that the most powerful emotion in the world, a close second to love, is found in freedom. If they had given Dr. Li the vehicle to speak freely and frequently, many would still be alive.

Instead, emblematic of dictatorships everywhere, they are scrambling to cover up yet another embarrassing policy failure, one of which was entirely in their control, and could have been entirely averted.

President Xi and the entire Chinese Communist Party face a continued trial against their de facto authority, and the coronavirus may prove to be the pivot point that fractures the party from within and without by further exposing its inner methodologies.

Confucianism, which Mao and the Communist Party attempted to stamp out, declared that rulers rule only at the behest of Heaven. Once corruption is exposed through natural disasters and unrest in the population, Confucius argued this was a way for Heaven to remove its blessing.

Perhaps the headline of 50-years-in-the-future is revealing itself sooner than expected.

This piece originally ran on Newsmax on Tuesday, 11 February 2020, and was co-authored with my husband, Dr. Lamont Colucci.

Documentary Offers News Perspective on International Relations With Iran (Newsmax Article)

Nov
07

Those that focus on international relations and diplomacy tend to concentrate on military power, political ideologies, and economic resources. When these foreign policy experts analyze religion, they often do so by lenses such as terrorism, extremism, or religious restrictions on behavior.

On the other hand, there are those that focus on religion where the emphasis is placed upon evangelism and belief. What the world is witnessing in Iran is a nexus where international relations and religious changes merge, creating the potential for a long-lasting positive change in both.

A new documentary, “Sheep Among Wolves II” produced by FAI (Frontier Alliance International) in conjunction with Dalton Thomas and Joel Richardson, depicts the growth of Christianity in Iran.

It begins with the revelation of a profound lack of faith among many in the Iranian population who remain Muslim-in-label only. Mosques are often empty, and religious laws are enforced due to the Shia extremists who hold power at the highest levels of government. These tyrannical actors overplayed their hand, and since 1979, have revealed to the entire nation that the purpose of their religion is to subjugate a people and rule them through the use of fear: beatings, tortures, assaults, and death.

So as the Iranian Shia theocracy attempts to pursue an imperial foreign policy endgame of ruling the Shiite Crescent (which stretches from the Persian Gulf through Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon), there exists an underground Christian movement that fosters peace and is not only pro-Jewish but pro-Israel. This Iranian Awakening has exploded across the country, majority-led by women who are former Muslims.

The movement, whose members potentially number in the millions, is characterized by a non-denominational, decentralized conversion process that the Iranian Christians call “Disciple-Making Moments” or DMM. DMM engages heavily with the super-natural aspect of Christianity, and at its roots is “relational” rather than “positional.” It begins with one believer within the movement engaging in prayer to be led by the Holy Spirit to a “person of peace,” sometimes even to a specific location where this person is. Once contact has been made, the believer initiates a conversation with the non-believer, shares personal vignettes of finding Jesus, witnesses to the nonbeliever, and prays for the non-believer’s needs.

In the documentary, one Iranian Christian says that Jesus moves among the non-believers faster than he had originally thought. In other words, many Iranian non-believers have already had visitations or dreams where Jesus appears to them, which makes the dialogue with potential new disciples much easier. After having this initial dialogue, the non-believer would be free to share the conversation with anyone within his/her social circle, although it usually begins with family members. If the non-believer returns to the Christian with at least two other people who are interested, this would be regarded as the beginnings of an infant church solely under the dominion of the Holy Spirit as it was conceived without a pastor, teacher, or evangelist. The leaders of DMM also make it abundantly clear that the number of people in a church is unimportant. Compared to churches in the West, the DMM method requires radical belief that God can plant seeds in hopeless deserts where Christianity is illegal and still achieve fruition under the threat of bodily death — not unlike the genesis of 1st century Christian-making under Roman rule.

There are many statistical debates about the number of Christians in Iran. The Iranian government, which has a vested interest in a propagandistic, low number, puts it at 117,000 people. However, both OpenDoors USA and the World Christian Database concurs with the documentary that the number is approximately more than half a million to one million and growing. It is interesting to note that arrests of Christians in Iran are on the upswing, and those labeled pastors are often prosecuted as threats to national security.

The implications made by “Sheep Among Wolves II” for international affairs and diplomacy are titanic. An Iran where Christianity flourishes is an Iran that will no longer harbor a desire of weapons of mass destruction, sponsor the worst forms of terrorism, commit horrible human rights atrocities against their own people, and seek the death of the Jewish people and Israel. It is also an Iran that comes back into the normal fold of civil international relations and has a flourishing relationship with the West, as it once did before the late 1970’s.

This piece originally ran on Newsmax on Thursday, 07 November 2019, and was co-authored by my husband, Dr. Lamont Colucci.