This is the Cater Daily podcast for Monday, July 12, 2021. I'm Caleb Brown. In marking 100 years of the Chinese Communist Party, what exactly are party leaders celebrating? Several decades of continuous rule, mass slaughter of Chinese people, and more recently crackdowns against free expression in Hong Kong and the imprisonment

of about a million Uyghur Muslims probably won't make the highlight real.

Cato's Doug Bandau and Eric Gomez comment on the dubious celebration.

When the Chinese Communist Party marks its own centennial, its own 100th anniversary,

what do they highlight? Much of what they highlight is essentially,

you know, that they have stood up, that they are now a strong independent country, they have

imposed themselves upon the world, that they have ended extreme poverty, that they've

given the Chinese people much to be proud of.

And indeed, if you look at China before the CCP took over, you can understand why people

wanted change. Unfortunately, the good things they claim to have delivered have come at an

extraordinarily high human cost.

Eric, from the outside looking in, the 100th anniversary of the Communist Party in China

doesn't seem like anything worth noting.

So when they highlight these achievements, what are they leaving out?

Well, like Doug said, the steep human costs of what it is taken to get to

where they are today, things like the famine produced during the Great Leap Forward in the 1950s,

things like the Cultural Revolution that saw widespread violence against people that the party didn't like, things like Tiananmen Square,

1989, and what's happening in Xinjiang with the genocide against the Uyghurs right now.

It's a very violent history that the CCP has had in its last 100 years. And unfortunately, that doesn't seem to be going

away anytime soon. We had different ideas about where China was headed in the 90s and the early

2000s. What's changed in that time? I think part of it is that, and somewhat paradoxically,

the engagement that the United States did with

...