As a journalist based in
China
in the mid-2000s, the big conversation was focused on how China would overtake the U.S. on the international stage. While economists explained how China’s economy would soon surpass that of the U.S., political wags admired China’s embrace of big projects. They contrasted China’s experience with America’s messy and slow-moving democracy.
Such understandings were buttressed by the financial crisis later in the decade. Chinese breakthroughs in artificial intelligence, green technology, and its continued double-digit economic growth further strengthened its reputation.
I always thought the pundits had it wrong on China. My skeptical views were always rooted in more than economic fundamentals or a partisan opinion on the value of democracy over autocracy. While China has made some stunning advances for its people — pulling hundreds of millions out of poverty — and has much to offer the world, it faces a moral reckoning.
Mao Zedong’s “Great Leap Forward” killed approximately 45 million people, while the Cultural Revolution saw ancient treasures and even more lives destroyed. The Tiananmen Square massacre was another tragedy, snuffing out voices of humanism and entrenching a dictatorial regime. The lack of an open discussion in China about these events will come back to haunt it.
I moved to China after seven years in the Czech Republic, where I witnessed a very public reckoning with the sins of its recent Communist past. It was imperfect, but that process contributed to putting the country on the road to prosperity. Around the same time, South Africa set up the Truth & Reconciliation Committee to deal with the horrors of apartheid. In the U.S., our robust press, academia, and freedom of speech foster a continuous and vigorous dialogue about all matters of our history.
Now China must reckon with its own history.
Beijing faces a real estate sector in crisis, a demographic disaster, global supply chains reorienting away from China, a failed COVID-19 policy now abandoned at great cost, and a United States that is newly competing with China on advanced manufacturing. China’s economic miracle seems to be over. Beneath these extremely difficult challenges reside the ghosts of the past.
These ghosts have stories to tell, and the reckoning for China’s sins might just be here.
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Jeremy Hurewitz is a policy adviser on National Security at
the Joseph Rainey Center
and a Strategic Advisor to Interfor International.
