My Suffering in Communist China Taught Me the Importance of a Free Press in America

Under the Trump administration, the media landscape seems to be changing for the better. While some legacy media journalists continue to push a biased narrative, their audiences are shriveling and influence is shrinking. Meanwhile, the White House pressroom is welcoming free-thinking, nontraditional media in droves.

But those of us who care about truth-seeking journalism should not get complacent. The country’s media environment could easily slide backwards. And let’s not kid ourselves. Left-wing reporters who put political correctness above all else don’t have a monopoly on sidelining the truth or holding water for the government.

I’ve experienced firsthand what can happen if the press is wholly captured by the state. Growing up in China, I lived through Mao Zedong’s reign of terror and the government’s tight grip on newspapers, radio, literature, and art. For me, the Great Leap Forward, Great Famine, and Cultural Revolution are more than time periods discussed in high school history classes.

I can still feel the rumbling in my stomach as I suffered from hunger as a child. I can remember the ghastly smells of rotting corpses, men and women whose bodies went uncollected after they died of starvation. And I recall the acres upon acres of splintered tree stumps left behind after deforestation.

Why did all of this happen? Because of government lies that were parroted by a press corps that took orders from the Chinese Communist Party.

State-owned newspapers printed ridiculous stories that exaggerated grain yields—claiming that existing land could produce 30 times the amount of food it was currently producing. Fake photos were even published to add an extra layer of believability to these claims. Meanwhile, honest journalists and experts who dared speak the truth were attacked and labeled as enemies of the state.

As a result of these exaggerations, farmers attempted to switch from food production to industrial manufacturing. People mindlessly and fanatically responded to Mao’s call to destroy forests, believing they could become steelmakers overnight. But there was one glaring problem: rural farmers simply didn’t have the technology, equipment, or know-how to make it happen.

The outcome was sadly predictable. Farmers had no time to harvest the grain, so they let it rot in the fields, and then subsequently failed to plant for the next season. All this eventually led to the outbreak of the Great Famine. Tens of millions of people starved to death as a result of the government’s lies and an obedient media that agreed to amplify the deception.

This set the stage for the Cultural Revolution, a period where Mao attempted to revive communist ideals and eliminate political opponents. When I was in the fifth grade, I witnessed mass unrest where “class mobs” turned violent against one another. People were killed, beheaded, and then gutted in the name of a political ideology.

It’s easy to dismiss these events as old news. But history often repeats itself. And as an eyewitness to the atrocities—fueled by a submissive press—that unfolded in China, I think the United States is dangerously close to going down a similar path.

While a growing skepticism of media under the Trump administration is giving voice to more truth-tellers in the arena of public debate, the policing of free speech in the press during the COVID-19 era is not that far in the rearview mirror. And during the 2024 election, much of the media concerningly organized in lockstep to put their thumbs on the scale in favor of Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign.

That’s why I established the Dao Prize with the National Journalism Center in 2023. The annual award recognizes excellence in investigative journalism and rewards journalists who seek the truth no matter the narrative being pushed by the powerful. It’s this type of politically blind reporting that will keep this country on track.

Credible journalism is experiencing a renaissance under the Trump administration. The legacy media that refuses to offer balanced reporting is facing brisk economic headwinds while objective reporters seeking the truth have a bigger voice than ever in the national conversation. But Americans must remain vigilant. As I witnessed in China, the dominoes can fall quickly.

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