When I reminded my 83-year-old mother on Wednesday that it was the 76th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China, she replied: “Yes, it was the day when my family was broken.”
That answer captures the paradox of modern China. To most Chinese in mainland China, Oct. 1 is a day of pride — a celebration of national strength, prosperity and global stature. However, on a deeper level, it is also a reminder to many of the families shattered, the freedoms extinguished and the lives sacrificed on the road here.
Seventy-six years ago, Chinese Communist leader Mao Zedong (毛澤東) declared “the Chinese people have stood up.” Since then, China has risen to become a global superpower: the world’s second-largest economy, a manufacturing engine, a technological competitor and a formidable military presence.
By the numbers, it is an extraordinary transformation. Yet the cost of that rise — human, cultural and moral — has too often been erased or dismissed as “necessary.”
The truth is that it was not. Many of the disasters that scarred China were not acts of fate, but choices made by leaders clinging to ideology and power out of self-interest.
The Great Leap Forward and the Great Famine left more than 40 million people dead. The Cultural Revolution decimated China’s heritage and sowed mistrust between neighbors and families. In Tiananmen Square, young people calling for reform met tanks instead. Even today, repression in Xinjiang, censorship across society and the silencing of Hong Kong are defended as tools of “stability.” The Chinese Communist Party calls these tragedies inevitable. They were not.
China’s real growth came only when the state loosened its grip. Communist leader Deng Xiaoping’s (鄧小平) reforms in the late 1970s — allowing markets to breathe, farmers to farm and entrepreneurs to take risks — unleashed creativity and productivity on a scale the world had never seen.
The irony is inescapable: Prosperity emerged not because of authoritarian excess, but in spite of it. China soared when ideology was restrained, not imposed.
Japan, South Korea and Taiwan industrialized in the same postwar decades, achieving prosperity without starving tens of millions or erasing centuries of culture. Their authoritarian periods were shorter, their transitions to democracy faster and their outcomes more stable. China’s rulers chose control and power over people.
The greatest loss is not only counted in the dead or imprisoned, but in the unseen: companies never founded, discoveries never made and ideas never spoken aloud. A society that teaches its brightest to be cautious instead of bold takes a toll on every generation. China’s rise is remarkable, but the opportunities it has cost are immeasurable. A nation of such size and talent could have gone further, higher and faster — if only it had been freer.
When Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) took power in 2012, he inherited a country on the rise: double-digit growth, expanding private enterprise, rising global prestige and a middle class that was beginning to emerge. Thirteen years later, that momentum has curdled. Xi has tightened censorship to levels unseen since Mao, expanded the surveillance state into daily life, and demanded ideological loyalty from every sector of society — from entrepreneurs and teachers to journalists, judges, religious leaders, tech innovators and even schoolchildren. He has lectured the world that his model is superior to the West, even as his economy slows and capital flees. His “common prosperity” campaign weakened private firms in favor of lumbering state-owned enterprises. His crackdown on tech and education destroyed trillions in market value and sent young people abroad in search of freedom.
Xi promised rejuvenation; what he delivered is regression at home and aggression abroad. China today is stronger militarily, but weaker economically, more repressive socially and more isolated internationally. The longer he rules, the clearer it becomes that he is squandering the inheritance he was given.
Today, China is powerful but distrusted. Admired for its scale, it is feared for its methods. It speaks of peace with the face of a panda, yet bares its teeth and flexes its claws in the Taiwan Strait and the South China Sea. The world does not recoil at China’s rise; it recoils at the terms of that rise — the surveillance state, the suppression of dissent, the export of coercion and the military threats it poses.
On its 76th anniversary, Chinese citizens should not only ask: “How far have we come?” but also: “How much further could we have gone if we were freer — and how do we correct the course the nation is on?” National pride is easy. Honest reckoning is harder. Without it, China’s history might not only haunt its past — it might repeat itself.
John Cheng is a retired businessman from Hong Kong now living in Taiwan.
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