October 1, 1949, 75 years ago: The People's Republic of China, a Communist state, is declared by Mao Zedong. This brings the 37-year-old Republic of China, and the 22-year-old Chinese Civil War between each side's respective forces, to an end.
As American conservatives said, 600 million people were suddenly hurled into slavery. But then, as with Cuba 9 years later, "Nationalist China," led by Chiang Kai-shek and now limited to the island of Formosa (which was renamed Taiwan), was not a particularly free country. Certainly, it was not a wealthy one.
Today, "Red China" is home to 1.4 billion people, more than any country on Earth, although India may surpass it in the next 20 years. After its "reopening" in the 1970s, it became a sports power, and moved toward becoming an economic power as well. It remains totalitarian in practice, but mostly in official name is it still Communist.
American conservatives still consider China to be a threat. They are not: They know that any overt attack on America would be national suicide, economically as well as militarily. They're not stupid.
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