"They walked out of China, seeking freedom to escape communism. My mother was born in Thailand in the early 1940s."

In her speech in Taipei, Tammy Duckworth, one of the three US senators visiting Taiwan island, was reported as having uttered the above-mentioned words about her mother's family, saying that they came from Guangdong province.

Of course she has the right to define what "freedom" is to her. However, there is one major loophole in her speech that's rather hard to explain: Her mother was born in Thailand in the 1940s, so her mother's family must have walked out of China before that. And anybody with the most basic knowledge about modern Chinese history knows that the Communist Party of China did not gain a national victory until 1949.

As one of the southern provinces, Guangdong was not liberated until mid-October that year. More accurately, Chaozhou, or Teochow as many Westerners call it, which Duckworth claimed her mother's family comes from, was ruled by Kuomintang forces until the imperial Japanese army claimed it in June 1939. The Kuomintang ruled it again in 1945 with the victory of World War II and then lost it in 1949.

Chaozhou suffered heavily during the rule of imperial Japanese armies. According to local official data, two local counties of Chaozhou, namely Chao'an and Raoping, saw their population drop from 1.25 million in 1938 to 980,000 in 1946.

So when Duckworth's maternal family left Guangdong, the reason could not be to "escape communism". Just on the contrary, they might have been trying to escape the cruel rule of Kuomintang, a major opponent of CPC, or the bloody rule of imperialistic Japan, a signatory party to the Anti-Comintern Pact. Both hate communists like the dark night hates the sun.

We know that some in the West tend to blame communism for everything and attribute every bad thing to China. However, while blaming China or communism, they might need to learn some history about it first.

So as not to make such bad jokes again.

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