In the 20’s they were fighting a Civil War, if I recall my history.
In the late 1930’s they were invaded by the Japanese, who committed all sorts of atrocities. Over and above the Rape of Nanking there were things like the 400,000 Chinese killed looking for people who supported Doolittle when he and his men landed there after their raid on Tokyo.
And they went straight from the Japanese to Mao. Mao–who by the way depended on “experts” for his agricultural policies–killed some 50 million Chinese in 3 years in the 1959-1961 timeframe.
But most Chinese were food insecure well into the 1980’s, as I understand it. The system never really worked.
And of course you had the Cultural Revolution from about 1966 to 1976, in which frothy mouthed children, who had been programmed into zombie-like frenzies of emotional cannibalism and murder, attempted to destroy Chinese CULTURE outright. And the Tibetans were thrown in there too. Hundreds or thousands of monasteries were destroyed. Priceless and irreplaceable books were burned, in exactly the same way Nazis burned them, or so I believe.
If you were a Chinese born more or less ANY time in the past hundred years, at some time in your life you endured horrific suffering.
Now we are reading that perhaps up to 23 million Chinese may have died already from COVID-19 or related causes (hunger perhaps being one of them, again, with it being very possible people have literally been starving to death in some of these quarantined cities). This, from the fact that seemingly there are 23 million less cell phone accounts now than 4 months ago, and since the repressive and unjust Chinese Communist Party uses those phones to track people. They would not easily give up their easy access to social information, to their version of the Number of the Beast (with which, to be clear, most of the world is also already marked, making microchips largely superfluous).
I personally wonder if the Chinese government did not simply order everyone to stay home no matter what, even if people fell ill, even if the young were infecting the elderly locked in with them. I wonder of millions of people did not die in their tiny apartments, miserable, hidden by their government, who came and picked up the bodies in the middle of the night, for cremation in places many miles from where any journalist would have been allowed to go.
What evil would be beyond a government capable of the crimes which the Chinese Communist Party has already manifestly and inarguably committed? There is no low too low, no cynicism too painful or beyond the pale, no evil which could not be justified both by the apologetics of “revolution”, and the rejection of “bourgeois morality”.
This world contains much horror in it. It is a horror for a bug to be crushed and eaten by a bird, but it happens billions or trillions of times a day. It is a horror for one person to cause another to die in pain, but history is filled with it.
History is filled with kindness, too, but I feel less of it. But of course, “history” is largely stories of war. The peacetime, happy stories come and go and leave little trace. They should of course not be forgotten, though, even so. It is useful to value times of peace and plenty, though. Far too few of us do.
As I think the Tao Te Ching taught, there is a place of truth which is neither beautiful nor ugly, but somehow beyond both. It is what we don’t and can’t see when we become fixated on one or the other, or even the opposition between them. This is not to rationalize evil, but rather to allow into our hearts the only sort of healing and nourishment that matters and which truly works.