Observers have hoped that increased interaction with other nations would nudge China toward developing a more free society. These hopes have been dashed sometimes, and been confirmed sometimes.
China’s legacy of atrocities and genocides included the ‘Great Leap Forward’ from 1958 to 1962 and the ‘Cultural Revolution’ from 1966 to 1969.
The ‘Great Leap Forward’ culminated in a manufactured famine which caused the deaths of approximately fifteen million people (some estimates range as high as thirty million).
The ‘Cultural Revolution,’ despite officially ending in 1969, caused painful ripple effects until 1976, causing the deaths of between 500,000 and two million Chinese, and several million more Tibetans.
The question, in the wake of Nixon’s diplomacy, was whether China would become more humane. The results were at best mixed. Occasionally gestures toward civil rights alternated with the events like the Massacre at Tiananmen Square in 1989, in which several thousand people died, or with the bullying of religious minorities like Christians and Tibetan Buddhists.
By 2015, journalists Chen Guangcheng and Melanie Kirkpatrick could write:
China often punishes its critics by abusing their relatives; Chen’s family was no exception. Over the years, his wife was assaulted, his daughter was forbidden to go to school, and a nephew was jailed. Some family members and close friends advised him to give up his work. “I felt misery about the pain my family had suffered,” he writes. “[But] I firmly believed — as I still do — that if you bow your head before the Communist Party, it will soon make you get on your hands and knees, and next it will stomp on your crouching body until it destroys you.”
Until 2015, China also pursued its ‘one child policy,’ forcing women to undergo forced sterilization and forced abortions.
Chen never says what motivated him to be the voice of the voiceless in China. He invokes “heaven” from time to time, and he remains faithful to Chinese traditions such as praying at the graves of ancestors. He makes no mention of God or religion. What his deeds make abundantly clear, though, is his belief in the sanctity of life and his great compassion for the sick, those with disabilities, and the unborn.
Moving toward the third decade of the twentieth century, the nations of the world looked to mass protests in Hong Kong in mid-2019 to see if there were any signs of what would come next: Whither China? Oppression or freedom?
