Bret Stephens: Bejing’s Great Leap Backwards

Several years ago, in an overheated room in Beijing, I was forced to endure a stern lecture from a Chinese foreign ministry official. My sin: As the editor at The Wall Street Journal responsible for the paper’s overseas opinion sections, I had apparently insulted the entire Chinese people by publishing the work of a “well-known terrorist” — courageous Uighur human-rights activist Rebiya Kadeer.I had to clench my jaw to suppress the rejoinder that China’s best-known