In its short rule of 5 1/2 decades, the Chinese party has perpetrated some of the most appalling atrocities of modern history: the mass murder of landed farmers in the early 1950s; the purge of hundreds of thousands of intellectuals and workers later that decade; the Great Leap Forward, in the wake of which 30 million died in an unprecedented man-made famine; and the long years of the Cultural Revolution, in which the country’s past was abnegated and officially sanctioned murders and purges occurred on a scale unimaginable even in Stalin’s Soviet Union.
Even in the heady days of economic weal and radical reform since the ’70s, the political landscape of China provides an unsettling vista, one that those who proclaim the country’s ascendancy would be well advised to keep in mind.