A Spirit of Enduring Optimism
For last week’s National Day celebrations, the The New York Times published an interview with 103-year-old who gives a firsthand account of the past 60 years of CCP rule:
Zhou Youguang was a child of 6 when a revolution toppled China’s last emperor in 1912. He was 43 when he says he left a Wall Street banker’s job to help Mao Zedong’s Communists create what he thought would be a democracy after decades of warlord rule, occupation and civil war.
Now 103, he has seen China transformed from a country of 368 million being carved up by foreign powers to a nation of 1.3 billion and the world’s fastest-growing major economy. He says he still believes China will eventually become a democracy — in spite of communism, not because of it.
“China will follow the mainstream of the world, sooner or later,” the pajama-clad Mr. Zhou said during an interview in the book-lined study of his third-floor walk-up apartment in central Beijing.
