Foreign Perspectives on The Southerner Newspaper
Saturday, December 27, 2025
China is frequently invoked as a modern miracle. An industrial giant and military power that is envied by many and loathed by some, which by its sheer resolve, strategic planning and national sacrifices, has become, the second largest economy on earth by Gross Domestic Product (GDP).
A once-poor country that, within a few decades, vaulted itself into the front rank of global power. Its highways stretch across provinces like arteries of steel. Its factories supply the world. Its cities glow with ambition. For politicians and development thinkers across Africa, Asia, and Latin America, China has become a reference point—proof that poverty is not destiny.
Yet admiration often stops where discomfort begins. What is celebrated is the result, not the reckoning. What is envied is the power, not the pain that forged it. History, however, has little patience for selective storytelling.
China’s rise was not smooth, not humane, and not consensual. It was carved out of humiliation, bloodshed, and relentless discipline. To admire the destination while ignoring the road is not optimism—it is intellectual evasion.
A civilization brought to Its knees
China’s modern transformation did not begin with economic reform in 1978. It began nearly two centuries earlier, with collapse.
From the early 1800s, China entered what it officially calls the *“Century of Humiliation”.* During this period, the Chinese state lost wars, territory, and dignity. The Opium Wars (1839–1842 and 1856–1860) forced China to open its markets under gunfire, cede Hong Kong, and accept unequal treaties that stripped it of sovereignty. Britain and France dictated terms. China obeyed.
Internally, the country was disintegrating.*The Taiping Rebellion* (1850–1864), driven by religious extremism and social despair, killed an estimated 20–30 million people, making it one of the deadliest conflicts in human history. Entire regions were depopulated. Trust in authority evaporated.
The 20th century brought no relief. Japan’s invasion and occupation (1931–1945) unleashed atrocities on an industrial scale, including the Nanjing Massacre, where hundreds of thousands of civilians were murdered.
This was followed by a brutal civil war between Nationalists and Communists, a conflict that tore families apart and normalized violence as politics.
By 1949, China was shattered. Life expectancy was under 45 years. Literacy hovered below 20 percent. GDP per capita was comparable to the poorest countries on earth. This was not a nation waiting to modernize. It was a civilization fighting to survive.
Power seized, at terrible cost
The founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949 did not usher in immediate stability. The first decades were catastrophic experiments in absolute power.
The Great Leap Forward: (1958–1962), intended to catapult China into industrial greatness, resulted in the deadliest famine in recorded history. Scholarly estimates place the death toll between 30 and 45 million people. Hunger became policy. Silence became survival.
Soon after came the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976).
Schools closed. Intellectuals were persecuted. Children denounced parents. Institutions collapsed. The very idea of truth became dangerous. These were not isolated mistakes. They were the consequences of a single-party system discovering—through mass suffering—how not to govern.
And yet, out of this devastation emerged a hardened national psyche. A collective vow formed in the Chinese consciousness: never again weak, never again humiliated.
The pragmatic turn: Growth as salvation
In 1978, Deng Xiaoping changed China’s trajectory. Not by loosening political control, but by redirecting it.
Markets were introduced, but the party remained supreme. Foreign capital was welcomed, but dissent was not. The state embraced export-led industrialization, special economic zones, and long-term central planning, while maintaining tight political discipline.
The results were historic. For more than three decades, China recorded average annual GDP growth of 9–10 percent. According to the World Bank, over 800 million people were lifted out of poverty, the largest poverty reduction ever achieved by a single country. China’s GDP grew from roughly $150 billion in 1978 to over $17 trillion today, making it the world’s second-largest economy.
China now produces over 28 percent of global manufacturing output, more than the United States, Japan, and Germany combined. It is the world’s largest exporter and holds foreign exchange reserves exceeding $3 trillion.
But political freedom did not grow alongside economic prosperity. It contracted.
The hidden ledger of progress
China’s rise demanded near-total alignment between society and state with no religious or political freedom.
Political opposition was extinguished. Media, academia, and the internet were tightly controlled. When dissent surfaced—most notably in Tiananmen Square in 1989—it was crushed with finality. Stability was non-negotiable.
Private life, too, became a site of governance. The one-child policy (1979–2015) reached into bedrooms and wombs. It was enforced through fines, coercion, forced abortions, and sterilizations. The result was a demographic imbalance of over 30 million “missing girls” and a rapidly aging population that now threatens China’s future labor force.
The environment paid its own price. Rapid industrialization made China the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases. Air and water pollution contributed to millions of premature deaths, according to public health studies. Economic growth was prioritized. Consequences were deferred.
China made a deliberate choice: development first, rights later—if ever.
Discipline withouti illusion
Contrary to popular myth, China did not tolerate corruption as a cultural inevitability. It confronted it with fear. Anti-corruption campaigns jailed, disgraced, and in some cases executed thousands of officials. Loyalty to the party eclipsed loyalty to family, ethnicity, or region. The state became the ultimate moral authority.
This was not governance by debate. It was governance by command.
The Nigerian mirror
Nigeria, like many postcolonial nations, admires China’s strength while recoiling from its methods. It wants the infrastructure, the prosperity, the global respect—but without the sacrifice, discipline, or national consensus that made them possible.
History poses uncomfortable questions.Are Nigerians prepared to endure sacrifice without immediate freedom? To accept institutions stronger than personalities? To subordinate ethnic, religious, and personal interests to a shared national project? To think in generations, not election cycles?
China’s rise required obedience, endurance, and the surrender of individual liberty to collective ambition. Nigeria today struggles with fragmented identity, weak institutions, entrenched corruption, and short-term political thinking.
No shortcuts, no illusions
China’s story is not a fairy tale. It is a warning.
Strong nations are not built by slogans, borrowed models, or moral shortcuts. They are built by choices—often brutal ones—sustained over decades. China chose order over freedom, cohesion over plurality, growth over comfort.
Whether that choice was just remains contested. That it was effective is beyond dispute.
The question is not whether Nigeria can become like China.
The real question is whether Nigeria is willing to pay the price that history has always demanded of nations that seek to matter.
History rewards resolve and those who act, not envy.
