Everyone should recognize this passage as the dreary finale of George Orwell’s Animal Farm. While it can be a slow journey from pigdom to humanity – from oppressed to oppressor – one who watches can see signs of the slide to where “some are more equal than others.”

Liang and his wife Qi are uniquely positioned to observe this slide. They recently emigrated from China to Ontario.

My husband and I sat down with their family a few weeks ago and they opened up a page from their history. When I asked them, “So why did you come to Canada?” their 9-year-old piped up, “Because we had too much homework in China!” We all laughed, but in his own way, the kid was right on.

Liang was quick to explain, “We came to give our children a better future, and some real options when they grow older.” Options are exactly what the young Chinese person does not have. There is only one road to success: do well in school, go to university, graduate with good marks, wear a suit and live the Chinese dream. The one rule which cannot be broken is compliance. Students must answer the same, act the same, wear uniforms, sport the same hairdo and walk in lockstep with the regime. “It’s like students walking into a factory and each coming out the exact same,” Liang commented.

Critical thinking is shunned. Commands must be followed to the letter. These are the winners in Chinese society. And the losers? They become tradesmen, groveling in dirt, shame and dishonor. “Tradesmen often give up on themselves, use drugs, find mediocre jobs – and live the animal life,” Liang said.

Why this big focus on compliance? Liang says it’s because robot citizens are easily controlled. And control is what the Chinese government is all about. Liang’s family experienced new layers of repression as the government’s “social credit” system was rolled out, which brought with it closer scrutiny of individual’s behavior. Liang and Qi saw that coercion grow to stifling levels under COVID, being forced to spend months on end stuck inside their house. They wanted better for their kids. In 2020, they made the decision to move to Canada, but weren’t able to actually leave China until a few years later. When the family did finally arrive in southern Ontario, they were ready for a fresh start, fresh opportunities and freedom.

The family began adjusting to Canadian culture. But Liang began to see little things about Canada that reminded him of China.

“The symptoms are the same,” Liang explained, describing a concerted attempt to destroy freedom and democracy. He sees socialism as a train, with education and censorship pulling hard as locomotives. The ultimate destination? A place eerily similar to totalitarian China.

Influencing what’s said and read

Censorship of free speech and the media became abundantly obvious to the average Canadian during COVID. Then, as a result of Trudeau’s 2023 Online News Act, Google and Meta (Facebook and Instagram) were told to either pay the government millions, or restrict users from sharing news articles. Google chose to pay $100 million a year, and Meta decided to put a news ban in place rather than pay out. This ban has greatly decreased online discourse and hurt small news outlets across the country, which had already been on the cusp of shutting down.

Further restrictions were pursued in the 2024 Online Harms Act which has not yet been passed. In the name of safety, the Liberal government was seeking more control. Space doesn’t permit getting into the details, but Jordan Peterson called it “truly the most authoritarian law conceivable.”

And of course, there’s the government’s ongoing funding of the CBC, at $1.4 billion a year, effectively cementing its role as a Liberal mouthpiece.

As Christians, we staunchly believe in the freedom to speak the truth. As Peter and the apostles responded to the high priest and council, “We must obey God rather than man” (Acts 5:29). On a civil level, that manifests itself as freedom of speech. But when government doesn’t acknowledge God, they start seeing themselves as the arbiters of what is true, and see for themselves an increasing role in suppressing speech they deem harmful. And so, socialism stifles free speech and the spread of truth, instead requiring citizens pay homage to the government.

Molding the next generation

Talking about education really got Liang going. His kids have been in the system for some time now, and it’s “a different method for the same purpose” in Liang’s books.

“They’re trying to kill your thoughts… In China, they make education extremely hard. Here in Canada, they try to stupefy the kids!”

There’s a strong focus, he said, on being nice, mellow and compliant. Critical thinking isn’t taught, and students are expected to regurgitate what they’re told. “Woke stuff,” Liang said, “is the ultimate compliance test. We give you absurd things to go along with and then check – are you compliant?”

Fostering anger and envy

Presenting a target of hatred is an important car in the socialism train. The most recent example of this is the Elbows Up campaign, and the increasing antipathy towards a nation who has been, by and large, an excellent ally for most of our history. This diversion tactic for the Liberal party has been shockingly successful with the vast majority of Canadians, who were once sick of Trudeau, now jumping on this bandwagon.

A more subtle element is creating artificial tension, or in Marxist terms, class warfare. Liang summed up Jagmeet Singh’s campaign as a posed dichotomy: “Do you want a government for millionaires or for the people?” That’s fair commentary, given Singh’s comments that he doesn’t work “for the rich and powerful,” but for the people, and his putting the blame of soaring costs squarely on “corporate greed.”

Singh is honing in on our inclination to covet our neighbor’s stuff… and the big boss’s position and power at work. Of course, the Bible condemns extorting the poor, and Christ calls us to avoid showing favoritism to the wealthy. But wealth in itself is not a sin – in fact, it can be the blessed result of hard work. Biblical “big bosses” like Abraham, Boaz, Job, and Joseph of Arimathea are honored as blessings to the community, and we, too, should honor those who administer well.

For Liang this is another cog in the wheel of socialism – there’s a strong push to create division between groups who historically have worked well together. Where would Canadians be without economic drivers like capitalists, corporations and entrepreneurs? Unemployed, most likely.

Scared and poor

In that train of socialism, Liang would add rising crime (which creates dependency upon the police), and rising taxes and inflation, which creates – you guessed it! – more dependency.

When those fail, there is always force. The truckers going to Ottawa and having the Emergencies Measures Act invoked on them? “That’s very Chinese,” said Liang. “After everything fails, they have the guns,” he said, recalling China’s silencing of whistleblowers.

“Lazy education, censorship of free speech, government-owned news, rising crime, taxes, inflation… It’s a master plan of socialism. The people in power remain in power, those in lower classes remain there. And everybody is supposed to be happy. You’re like pigs on a farm.”

Intentionally or not so, Liang has brought us back to George Orwell’s pigs on a farm. Given the track we’re on, is there any way to “Stop the train!”? Liang believes hope lies in providing options to our kids and teaching them to actually think. “As long as you have options, you have hope, and can choose wisely.”

Ever present refuge

It’s a troubling time, and hearing a piece-by-piece comparison of Canada and China from a veteran of communism is not encouraging. Will our nation continue its sprint towards becoming Chinada? This election is a watershed moment.

But there’s one thing George Orwell didn’t factor into his stories: God Himself. Our King reigns. As Psalm 2 declares, our King laughs in derision at the raging politicians. He will speak to them in His wrath and terrify them in His fury. So be wise, oh prime minister! Be warned, oh rulers of the earth! Serve the Lord with fear.

And for us – blessed are all who take refuge in Him. Amen.

Names and some details changed to protect sources from reprisals by the Chinese government.

Cartoonist and Chinese-Canadian Mei Yu shares the mostly true story of her own immigration experience as a young girl. On arriving in Canada, she is sent to school to sink or swim and there is a lot of floundering early on. Her classmates’ dialogue, spoken in English which she doesn’t yet understand, is shown in a green font, while her Chinese conversations with her parents and with her stuffed animal, Kitty Paws, are shown in the typical black font. The large amounts of green in the first half of the book give readers a good idea as to just how confusing it all is for Mei Yu.

This could actually have been a pretty brutal book, what with how scary it is for Mei Yu to be in a country where she doesn’t understand anything. But for comic relief we have her stuffie, Kitty Paws, coming to life to provide her companionship, and to narrate parts of the story. The brightly colored artwork, in its vaguely Manga, far-from-realistic-style, also helps ease the tension. There’s also some comic confusion that lightens things, such as when Mei Yu eats her very first sandwich with chopsticks, instead of holding it with her hands!

We do have to wait quite a while for our hero to finally start feeling comfortable – it takes all the way to page 100 before she begins to be able to communicate with her classmates. But there is a very happy ending, with Mei Yu’s artistic skills helping to bridge the gap between the two languages.

Cautions

There is a very little bit of potty humor, but not done simply to be naughty. In one early miscue, Mei Yu’s “pee levels” as her stuffie Kitty Paws puts it, are nearing the emergency mark, so she’s desperate to go to the washroom. But in her hurry she ends up in the boys’ bathroom, and then, when a boy comes in, she thinks he’s made the mistake, so she can’t figure out why her classmates are laughing at her.

Conclusion

This is a book every school library should get for how effectively it shows what it is like to be an outsider – this is a book that can help build some empathy. The target audience is elementary, but this would be an interesting read for anyone Grade 2 on into high school. For older kids, Shaun Tan’s The Arrival offers a very different comic book immigration account.

There is a sequel out now, that tackles bullying. But the bullied student deals with it by doing a class project which then denounces the bullies in front of the whole class. There are all sorts of difficulties in dealing with bullies, but I don’t think this is an advisable example, and so don’t recommend it. 

*****

Most mornings I waken to the sound of sparrows chittering and chattering.

Approximately twenty to thirty little house sparrows have a sun-up inclination to alight on one of the cedar bushes right next to my window. These sparrows used to reside in my laundry poles – winter and summer. They had their babies there and they slept there. They also poked out their gray, brown heads and white cheeks to assess me as I walked by on my way to the chicken coop every morning.

Perhaps they now resent me as I cut down one of the laundry poles last summer. Feeling guilty about cutting down the laundry pole home, I fill the bird feeder with lots of seed. I have named eight of the songsters – Sam, Pete, Al, Rudy, Rembrandt, Ollie, William and Simon – and their daily, simple notes of joy give me pleasure and comfort.

A father who loved sparrows

My Dad told me that when he was a little boy, he learned to sing Psalm 84, especially verse 3, with great enthusiasm. He sang the Psalm in Dutch and the translated version of verse 3 reads:

Even the sparrow finds a home,
and the swallow a nest for herself,
where she may lay her young,
at your altars, O Lord of hosts,
my King and my God.

My Dad, who was a wonderful story teller, went on to relate that he thought the word altars, which in the Dutch language sounds a lot like lanterns, meant that sparrows would eventually make their homes in the lanterns lining his street. Consequently, dressed in short pants and a blue jacket, he would stand for long periods of time underneath the street lanterns. He would crane his neck and gaze up at these lamps, hoping to see sparrows lay their babies in the lights. It never happened, but he was convinced for a long time that it would happen.

The Chairman who hated them

In 1893, seventeen years before my Dad’s birth, Mao Zedong was born. Growing up to become the first chairman of the Communist Party of China (1935-1976), as well as being the founding father of the People’s Republic of China, Mao had absolutely no respect for, or understanding of, the Psalms. Neither did he love the sparrow, that fifth-day creature which God had set in the sky to be a blessing to mankind.

In 1958, the year my family immigrated from Holland to Canada, Mao Zedong, Marxist dictator of the world’s most populous country, decreed that all the sparrows of China were to be killed. Ostensibly to help China leap forward economically and socially, he began a “Four Pests Campaign” (1958-1962) to eradicate, among other animals, the Eurasian tree sparrow.

The Chinese Chairman, an unbelieving little man who did not comprehend that the sparse hairs of his head were numbered by God, did not know what he was doing. His proud slogan was: “Man must conquer Nature.” And, because of his campaign, the vast country and grand country of China, instead of leaping forward, began to leap backwards into famine and death.

Matthew 10:29-31 tells us:

“Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? And not one of them will fall to the ground apart from your Father. But even the hairs of your head are all numbered. Fear not, therefore; you are of more value than many sparrows.”

That is to say, God’s people are of more value than the sparrows; that is to say, God works all things out for His people’s good. He cares for them.

Besides the tiny, chestnut-crowned sparrow, three other animals were targeted in an overall elimination crusade. These three animals were the mosquito, the rat and the fly. Mao’s reasoning was: mosquitoes cause malaria; rats cause the plague; and flies are a general nuisance. Sparrows were included at the tail end of the elimination list because they ate both grain and fruit.

Chinese poster declaring war against the four pests: mosquitos, flies, rats, & sparrows

Government didn’t know best

Mao enacted a law in 1959 which made it mandatory for Chinese citizens to participate in the offensive against this common little bird, the sparrow. He had no idea that this little song-bird helped plants to grow. When the sparrow ate from plants, it passed on the seeds in its droppings. Mao didn’t have a clue that these small twitterers also served as food for other larger birds and mammals, nor that they helped provide necessary fertilizer with their excrement for the plants on which they fed. Neither did the Chairman know that sparrows ate harmful insects. With the enacting of Mao’s law to kill the diminutive sparrows with their kidney-shaped, black ear patches, the Chinese ecosystem and environment took a downward turn.

The Chinese people took to arms. They were forced to do so. All over the country people banged pots and pans together to prevent the little birds from settling into their nests. The little “pests” were about twelve centimeters in length and weighed less than an ounce. There were numerous posters declaring war on the birds. Young boys and men fired at the midget flyers with guns and slingshots. Yelling and screaming crowds beat trees with long, wooden poles. As soon as any little creature perched anywhere, worn out by the riots below them, they would be harassed to such a point that they would drop dead from exhaustion. Exhilarated by what they thought was a great leap forward and constantly praised by the authorities for their diligence, people collected dead birds and tied their petite brown bodies together, forming feathery ropes of destruction.

One small light in this fowl massacre was the Polish Embassy in Beijing. They refused to engage in the killing of the sparrows. A refuge for the remaining sparrows, the embassy was eventually surrounded by zealous Chinese citizens, who shouted and shrieked continuously. In the long run, the sparrows hiding in this small space also died. The Polish personnel cleared their area of dead sparrows with shovels.

Instead of sparrows, locusts

Psalm 102:7 reads: “I lie awake, I am like a lonely sparrow on the housetop.”

There were many lonely birds after Mao’s feather massacre. No census of them was taken prior to their demise. But it is estimated that there were perhaps some six hundred million of them. Hundreds of millions were eliminated through Mao’s campaign. The year after the murder of these birds began, insect infestation of field crops increased, the locust being the main predator. The locusts multiplied and ate everything in their path. Grain production collapsed and a famine began. All the places in which sparrows no longer chirped and chipped, had no cereal output.

The Great Famine which ensued is not allowed to be spoken of in China. Rather, this desolate time is referred to as the “Three Years of Natural Disaster” or the “Three Years of Difficulties.” Yang Jisheng, (1940-  ), Chinese journalist and author, wrote a book entitled Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine, 1958-1962. First published in Chinese in 2008 (and translated into English in 2008), it chronicles the Great Famine and the Great Leap Forward. Although he was, for a time, a loyal Communist, the Tiananmen Square massacre destroyed Jisheng’s faith in the Party.

Mao’s arrogance killed tens of millions

The horror stories chronicled by Jisheng are brutal and graphic. He records, among many, many incidents:

• a teenage orphan killing and eating her four-year-old brother
• the death of 44 of a village’s 45 inhabitants and the consequent insanity of the last remaining resident, a woman in her 60s
• the torture and beatings and live burials of people who declared realistic harvests, who refused to hand over what little food they had, and who stole scraps or simply angered officials

Jisheng wrote regarding his research:

“I didn’t think it would be so serious and so brutal and so bloody. I didn’t know that there were thousands of cases of cannibalism. I didn’t know about farmers who were beaten to death. People died in the family and they didn’t bury the person because they could still collect their food rations; they kept the bodies in bed and covered them up and the corpses were eaten by mice. People ate corpses and fought for the bodies. In Gansu they killed outsiders; people told me strangers passed through and they killed and ate them. And they ate their own children. Terrible! Too terrible!”

Devoting fifteen years to documenting this terrible famine, Jisheng catalogued a three-year catastrophe that is estimated to have taken 36 to 55 million lives across China.

At the end of his campaign against the four designated pests, Mao Zedong ordered the vendetta against sparrows ended, replacing it with an operation against bed bugs. Eventually, the People’s Republic of China had to import 250,000 sparrows from the then Soviet Union to stop the ecological disruption. After the sparrows had settled back into the country, the locust population was brought under control once more.

Over a period of three years, it is estimated that one billion sparrows, 1.5 billion rats, 100 million kilograms of flies and 11 million kilograms of mosquitos were annihilated throughout China. Ecological and economic disaster jeopardized the very fabric of the country. Even as Nebuchadnezzar before him, Mao was deluded into thinking that he owned nature. Mao (in)famously quipped: “Make the high mountain bow its head; make the river yield the way.” The truth is that Sinai and Jordan laughed at him and God held him in derision. Where is this mass murderer now?

Conclusion

In this day and age, when so much misery and terrible economic disaster looms and threatens to undo us, we do well to remember the sparrow blessing, the blessing which Jesus gives to all who acknowledge Him:

“But even the hairs of your head are all numbered. Fear not, therefore; you are of more value than many sparrows.So everyone who acknowledges Me before men, I also will acknowledge before My Father Who is in heaven, but whoever denies Me before men, I also will deny before My Father Who is in heaven.”
– Matthew 10:30-33

I asked my 13 year-old and her friend whether they’d heard about China’s Tiananmen Square and neither knew anything about it. I was surprised, but shouldn’t have been: the massacre the square is known for – with the government’s tanks rolling over protesting Chinese students, killing hundreds and maybe thousands – happened 20 years before they were born.

Tiananmen 1989 is a lightly fictionalized biography of one of the student organizers, Lin Zhang – all the main figures are real, but some surrounding fictionalized characters have been added to round things out.

The comic begins 30 years prior to the protests, with Lin Zhang’s early years, and accounts of various Chinese Communist Party government leaders rising in influence, then getting purged, and some later being “rehabilitated.” That’s three decades covered in the first 25 pages.

From there it slows down, and for the next 75 pages we get an inside look at the protest’s 50 days, beginning on April 16, 1989. We learn that the tens and maybe hundreds of thousands of students arriving at Tiananmen Square was a spontaneous event, organized only after the fact. We hear students debate with each other about what a win would look like. We see hundreds of students decide to hunger strike en masse. And then we watch as the soldiers march in shooting.

Cautions

Thankfully the violence is depicted with moderation – we see a couple of people shot, and some bodies at a distance. This isn’t a graphic novel you’d want to put in your elementary school library, but no high schooler would be shocked.

Language concerns are limited to a couple uses of “bastard.”

The more notable caution would be ideological. The god of this book is democracy. That’s what the students were after, and willing to die for. It’s what they placed all their hope in. They spoke of their fight in spiritual tones, likening it to a battle of “light vs. darkness.”  Near the end of the protest they even crafted a “goddess of democracy” statue. Young readers need to understand that democracy wouldn’t have been the fix-all that the students thought it would be. Their communist state was founded on the sin of envy, and a turn to democracy wouldn’t have done anything to excise the envy – it is prevalent, and every bit as destructive, in democracies too.

While this is an insider’s perspective, I was impressed with its moderate tone. He’s criticizing his government, but also celebrates some within it. I did wonder if some bias might have been evident in the numbers: he wrote of a million protesters, whereas other accounts list as few as 100,000.

Conclusion

I think the memory of the massacre has faded even among those old enough to have seen it happen, reported live by CNN and the BBC, and carried by stations around the world. Do Canadians still remember what happened after martial law was declared, and thousands of Chinese troops descended on the unarmed students? Governments around the world condemned the Communist Party leadership for its violent overreaction.

If Canadians still remembered, I rather suspect Prime Minister Trudeau wouldn’t have dared invoke the Emergency Measures Act this past summer to turn the police on the Freedom Convoy protest on Parliament Hill. Connections would have been made.

If our young people were taught about the Tiananmen Square Massacre, they’d be aware that powerful governments have done enormous harm to their own citizenry. Yet a recent poll of Americans shared that among the under-30s polled, 29% would favor an in-home government surveillance camera, installed in the name of reducing domestic crime. A third of these young people trust their government so completely they’d like it in their houses.

There’s good reason then, to get this book into our school libraries. God calls us to honor those He puts in place over us, but it is only when we understand how power can corrupt, and how power has been abused, that we will know the importance of limited, restrained government.

13-year-old Wei Minzhi is left in charge of a one-classroom elementary school in rural China and is told she will be paid 50 yuan for one month of work. She will also get a 10 yuan bonus if there is “not one less” student – if she maintains the enrollment – when the month is done and the regular teacher returns.

So when one little boy heads off to the city to find work, Wei is determined to bring the boy back so she can get her bonus. First though, she has to find enough money to buy a bus ticket to the city…and her students aren’t willing to contribute. Once there she will have another problem – how do you find one little boy in a city of millions?

This is a strangely compelling movie, showing some of the extremes of China, particularly the wealth of the major city contrasted with the poverty of the rural school. While the actors in this film are all amateurs – the mayor of the town is played by the mayor of a town, the students are played by students, the TV announcer played by a TV announcer, and so on – the acting is good, in an understated sort of way. This is a gentle, excellent little film, but it might be too slow for those not used to foreign fare. But if you stick with it, it does pay off.

“no country has successfully reversed birth-rate decline, which tends to track with development, as wealthier, urbanized populations choose to have less children.”

“China’s demographic and economic outlook is much bleaker than expected,” demographer Yi Fuxian commented in response to these findings. China is realizing quickly what Psalm 127:3 proclaims: “Children are a heritage from the LORD, offspring a reward from Him.”

However, even as China is being confronted by this truth, Canada and much of the Western world continues to discourage children and is relying on immigration to keep the population and economy stable or growing. But where are these immigrants coming from, and what happens when these countries too need people? And if no country has been successful with reversing a decline, what happens when the world’s population begins to decline, as is expected later this century?

Through birth, fostering, and adoption, Christian families have an opportunity to show to the world the gift that life is.

For 36 years China enforced a One Child Policy by tearing unborn babies out of their mothers’ wombs. But then the Chinese government began to realize their policy would leave a single child supporting 2 parents and 4 grandparents, without help from siblings, uncles, aunts, or cousins, because none of them would ever have existed. China’s policy left an aging populace supported by a shrinking workforce.

That may be why the policy wasn’t universally enforced across the country. But from 1979 when it was first implemented, to 2015 when it was changed, the birthrate per woman dropped from 2.7 to 1.7. A replacement birthrate – one that keeps the population at the same size – is 2.1, with the two children there to take the place of their two parents (the .1 is there to account for childhood deaths.)

But since the One Child Policy was expanded to a Two Child Policy in 2015, China’s birthrate, after inching up slightly right afterward, has been declining for the last four years to 1.3.

Thus the Chinese government’s newly announced restrictions on abortion.

There’s nothing repentant about this pro-life turn – this is the same utilitarian ethic that motivated their One Child Policy. They wanted to slow their population then, so they killed babies; they want a growing population now, so they are saving babies. It’s all about effective management of their population and their economy. But in this one area, their policies have switched from defiance to God’s revealed will – children being a blessing, not a curse (Ps. 127:3) – to being much more in accord with it (Gen. 9:6). It may be too late for them to halt their demographic decline, but there will still be fruit from this pro-life turn. The God who spoke all into being defines reality, and there is a benefit in aligning with His reality, rather than trying to run headlong against it.

We can be rightfully ashamed (and fearful) that this leaves Canada along with Vietnam and North Korea as the only countries with unfettered abortion. But we can also celebrate that in China, and Texas, and other places around the world, there are governments aligning themselves with reality by beginning to protect unborn children like the blessings they are.