Imagine surviving the clutches of the Red Guard, enduring over a year in a CCP prison, and emerging with unbreakable insights into the heart of totalitarianism. That's the raw, eye-opening story of Stanford senior research scholar @ChenggangXu2024.
"Totalitarianism means that they do not allow for existence of any [independent] organization, internally and also externally. And that is why, under this kind of regime, is impossible to transform peacefully into democracy, because democracy has to have a civil society. Civil society means independent organizations, means citizens have to organize themselves. Only when citizens organize themselves, they have the power. So when no one can organize anything, then no one has power. So this is actually really the key of understanding totalitarianism.
