Beijing - China on Thursday accused US President George W Bush of reviving "Cold War thinking" by inaugurating a monument to 100 million people whose deaths were blamed on communist regimes. "Some political forces in the United States still use Cold War thinking and aim to provoke conflicts between different ideologies and social systems," foreign ministry spokesman Qin Gang said in a statement after Bush's speech in Washington.
"We express our strong dissatisfaction and resolute opposition to the statements and actions of the US side," Qin said.
"The United States should stop interfering in the internal affairs of other nations," he said.
Bush said at the new Victims of Communism Memorial that the number of people killed "in communism's name" was "staggering."
Survivors of communist repression from Belarus, Vietnam and dozens of other countries gathered Tuesday near the US Capitol Building for the ceremony to dedicate the memorial to the victims of communism.
The statue is a replica of a Statue of Liberty-style "Goddess of Democracy" erected by Chinese protesters in Beijing's Tiananmen Square in 1989, during a movement that ended with the death of hundreds when China's ruling Communist Party sent tanks and troops to clear the square.
Buh said the statue "reminds us that when an ideology kills tens of millions of people, and still ends up being vanquished, it is contending with a power greater than death."
The figure of 100 million political deaths under communism was based on the 1997 book by French scholars, The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression, published by Harvard University.
The book estimated that some 65 million people had died in China during the famines of the Great Leap Forward in the late 1950s and the violent communist fundamentalism of the 1966-1976 Cultural Revolution.
