As the Chinese Communist Party, led by dictator Xi Jinping, celebrated its 100th anniversary on July 1, some in the Western media appeared to celebrate with them. Some outlets virtually adopted the CCP’s party line as their own.
NBC News struck a note of anti-American defiance with the headline, “Xi Jinping says China won’t be bullied on 100th anniversary of Communist Party.” NBC noted that Xi promised foreign nations trying to “bully” Beijing will “get their heads bashed.”
NBC passed over criticisms of Beijing’s abysmal human rights record, reporting on “Western powers’ accusations that Beijing has been abusing its power from Xinjiang to Hong Kong,” and its “alleged human rights abuses against the Uyghurs.” (Emphasis added.)
The article did little to expound upon those undeniable realities, instead reporting the abundant “satisfaction among many Chinese people” under CCP rule. It quoted a Beijing-based “think tank” scholar who credited the CCP with “eliminating abject poverty, improving the health and life expectancy of 1.4 billion Chinese people, rolling out one of the best infrastructure networks in the world, and leapfrogging into the world’s second largest economy without resorting to colonization.” In all, NBC devoted five paragraphs to praising the CCP’s rule of the world’s largest totalitarian state.
The NBC story briefly mentioned “millions of people who starved to death during the Great Leap Forward” and Mao Tse-tung’s “Cultural Revolution” unleashed “chaos and persecutions.” But even that undercounts the number of people killed by the Chinese Communist Party 10- to 40-fold.
Mao’s effort to collectivize China’s farms and factories, which he called “The Great Leap Forward” (1958 to 1962), killed at least 45 million people. The Cultural Revolution, which began in 1966 and continued in fits and starts until Mao’s death in 1976, snuffed out another 1.5 million lives.
Of the nine million Chinese kept in gulags, one-third died of starvation and perhaps as many as another one-third committed suicide. The CCP ordered 2.5 million Chinese “tortured to death or summarily killed, often for the slightest infraction,” according to historian Frank Dikötter.
“When a boy stole a handful of grain in a Hunan village, local boss Xiong Dechang forced his father to bury him alive,” he noted.
The New York Times noted accurately, “Tens of millions died — not only from starvation and disease from the famine that followed, but also from torture, execution or suicide at the hands of party officials enforcing Mao’s misguided decrees to boost production and punish anyone who resisted.”
Despite the CCP’s undeniably bloody past (and present), the legacy media generally shared NBC’s apparent sense of joy on its birthday.
The Associated Press passed on Chinese Communist Party talking points in a story with the celebratory title, “China’s leader Xi hands out medals amid party celebrations.” It noted that “[t]he vast majority of government officials and leaders of state industry are party members”—which is not uncommon in a one-party state—“providing what the leadership hails as a source of social cohesion in contrast to partisan divides in the U.S. and elsewhere.”
CNN’s Ben Westcott reported, “The Chinese Communist Party is about to turn 100 but Xi will be the real star.” Although Westcott noted the Chinese Communist Party has “been responsible for some of the darkest chapters of the last century,” he presented the CCP as a plucky party “keenly aware of the risks it faces, from a slowing economy, an aging population and a shrinking workforce, to an increasingly united West that is determined to counter its rise.”
CNN’s coverage proved so insufferably sycophantic that one Twitter user responded, “This is Xi-N-N.”
“This is Xi-N-N”
— Ben Shadowban (@01entrepreneur1) June 30, 2021
President Joe Biden, too, has expressed a fancy for one of Mao’s sayings, repeatedly quoting Mao since Biden launched his most recent presidential campaign.
Meanwhile, some maintained the steadfast battle to remind the world of the human cost of Marxist utopian ideology. “It’s time to confront the crimes of the Chinese Communist Party,” said the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation. The foundation tweeted a video by a survivor of the Marxist regime describing how Communists maintained their iron grip on the nation through a policy of divide-and-conquer.
It's time to confront the crimes of the Chinese Communist Party. #CCP100 #100YearsofRepression pic.twitter.com/ZoOJT2hfjF
— Victims of Communism (@VoCommunism) July 1, 2021
Former Trump administration UN Ambassador Nikki Haley greeted the CCP’s centenary with a more somber tone, saying, “As the Chinese Communist Party celebrates 100 years of existence, we can’t forget the 1,000,000 Uyghurs they are imprisoning and torturing in concentration camps.”
“Today is not a day to celebrate,” she wrote. “It’s a day to mourn China’s victims.”
As the Chinese Communist Party celebrates 100 years of existence, we can’t forget the 1,000,000 Uyghurs they are imprisoning and torturing in concentration camps.
Today is not a day to celebrate, it's a day to mourn China's victims. pic.twitter.com/tMlvJs5URU
— Nikki Haley (@NikkiHaley) July 1, 2021
The views expressed in this piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.