China is the world's most populated nation, having a total of 1.3 billion people. It's also a rich culture that stretches back over 3,200 years, making it one of the oldest continuing societies in the world. You would think that China having the population and culture it has that they would be an open society where people could exchange ideas and be free to express themselves. Well you'd be wrong about that because everything in China is controlled and governed by the Communist party.
October 1st marked the 70th anniversary of China's communist government. Often I see people in a society as free as ours forget that communism has a devastating impact on society. Disturbingly, some in the American media don't seem very phased by the long-term consequences of China's one-party communist system. Even the New York Times was confronted the other week for praising the bloody legacy of Communist China's first leader, Mao Zedong. The fact is 70 million people were killed in the various purges during the communist takeover of China.
Our press often forgets that not every country is as free as our own. China has suffered for seventy years, but if you were to ask the mainstream media or the general public about this tragedy, most couldn't give an informed answer.
The American media's inability to understand this threat appropriately allows misinformation and Chinese propaganda to dominate in the press, on the internet and in broadcasts. The Chinese government's impact on the world over the past seven decades has not been positive except in producing cheap goods for sale at Walmart.
As an objective journalist and writer I feel sympathetic and sad for the Chinese people themselves. Their own government prevents them from enjoying a free and open a society like the one we enjoy in the Western democracies. With a population of over a billion people many of China's civilians have so much potential and could do so much, only if their society was more free and open. What's even more disheartening is that China is trying to oppress nearby free peoples. The people of Hong Kong have to worry about China's tyrannical government and about Chinese troops invading.
America managed to cause the collapse of the tyrannical Communist regime in the Soviet Union in the eighties, but international political observers suggest that China is a more difficult threat than we faced with old Soviet Union decades ago. This is not just because China is trying to spread its influence internationally, but also because many are not educated about communism's history. Activists and apologists for China in particular and socialism in general are always looking to exploit the uneducated in order to push an international agenda that supports a tyrannical regime. Knowledge is power and the more we know the more we can prevent the type of societies Mao created in China and Lenin created in the old Soviet Union from ever wreaking havoc on civilization again.
We should not be worried about whether the next seventy years will be kind to China, we should be worried that the rest of the world will not repeat the same mistakes that gave us millions of dead for the sake of a Communist dictatorship.
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