Article by Yukong Zhao in National Review
America’s Founding Beats the Chinese Communist Party’s
As both nations celebrate recent anniversaries, it’s worth looking at why the U.S. wins out.
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.
In America, by contrast, we see a totally different picture. A few days ago, the Olympic athlete Gwen Berry turned away from the U.S. flag during the national anthem. The Biden administration canceled South Dakota’s Mount Rushmore fireworks celebration in front of statues of our great presidents. Instead of promoting patriotism, the Biden administration, through the Department of Education, is supporting efforts to indoctrinate our children with critical race theory, which baselessly claims that there is widespread systemic racism against black and Hispanic Americans in modern American society, requiring extensive government redress. Perversely, our non-government media supports these and other government efforts, joining the Biden administration in dwelling more on “social injustice” in America than on American patriotism.
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. Politically, Deng stopped the Communist Class Struggle Movement. Economically, he gradually abolished the Communist doctrine of state ownership and planned economy and introduced private ownership, the free-market system, and modern technologies from the West.
After the CCP loosened its iron-fist of big-government control, the highly motivated, hardworking Chinese people released their energy and creativity and successfully built China into the second-largest economy in the world. It was the private-ownership and free-market system America champions, not China’s Communist ideology, that contributed to China’s rapid economic growth and technological advancement. In spite of its economic and technological progress, the Chinese government has not provided the individual and political freedom to its people. In Hong Kong, Xinjiang, and the rest of China, political dissidents are frequently jailed. For regular Chinese, the CCP still monitors and limits what they say in public or on social media, and controls their ability to wire money abroad and even how many children they can have. To pursue individual freedom, tens of thousands Chinese emigrate to industrial nations each year. Their favorite destination is America.
Unfortunately, in today’s America, our media rarely talk about the biggest miracle in human history — the unprecedented achievements of America since her independence. In the late 18th century, America was founded upon a number of key principles: freedom of speech, rule of the law, the free-market system, checks and balances, democracy, equality, and meritocracy. Since then, Americans have led the world in technological innovation, inventing electric-power generation, the airplane, telephone, personal computer, the Internet, and many other major technologies. By 1916, the U.S. surpassed the whole British Empire, becoming the largest economy in the world.
America also leads the world in improving human rights. In the 19th century, America emancipated its slaves, a stain on its Founding yet defeated by that Founding’s very principles. In the 20th century, America led the world, defeating fascism, militarism, and communism. And thanks to the civil-rights movement, America again lived up to its founding principles, abolishing all the laws that discriminated against black and Hispanic Americans.
For our nation’s 245th birthday, we should remind all Americans: On economic, technological and social-justice fronts, America is the greatest nation on earth. Rather than using the failed big-government or Communist ideology to transform America, we should cherish America’s founding principles.
https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/07/americas-founding-beats-the-chinese-communist-partys/#slide-1
