Yukong Zhao writes for National Review Online about contrasting national stories. The American founding wins.
This July, both America and China have celebrated anniversaries important to each respective nation: America marked the 245th anniversary of its independence, and China marked the 100th anniversary of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
China celebrates the immense progress it purports to have made in recent decades: lifting hundreds of millions of people out of poverty, developing unmatched manufacturing capabilities, building a modern infrastructure, as well as making rapid technological advancement in 5G communication, high-speed railways, space exploration, and other areas. As expected, the government-run Chinese media delivers all the credit to the CCP. …
… If we only listen to the Biden administration and our mainstream media, we see America as a problematic nation plagued by social injustice, and in need of a fundamental transformation. Some would mistakenly conclude that China’s big-government control is a better way to solve America’s socioeconomic challenges. But as someone who escaped Communist China and now lives in democratic America, I want to tell you that neither the Chinese media nor the American mainstream media are telling you the whole story.
The Chinese media do not tell you about the horrendous atrocities and extreme poverty created by the CCP in the first 30 years of its reign. Guided by the Marxist ideology, Mao Zedong and his comrades launched the nationwide Class Struggle movement and murdered millions of innocent landlords and other political opponents. The Great Leap Forward, Mao’s Communist utopian experiment, starved 30 million Chinese people to death. The Cultural Revolution Mao launched destroyed 3,000 years of Chinese cultural heritage, murdered tens of thousands of people, and led to economic collapse in China.
It is true that China has made tremendous progress in improving the living standard of its people, but it’s not because of the big-government/Communist ideology. On the contrary, it is because former Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping wisely abandoned most of the Communist ideology and started learning from the West after he took power in 1978.