The "Free Press", freed: https://archive.ph/v16R3

India saw a similar issue in the 1970-80s with the rise of the far-left Naxal movement and the far-right Hindutva movement, and the political strife in addition to the collapse of the USSR caused led a country that was contemporaneously comparable to China in the 1980s-90s falling 15 years behind China by the 2010s.

Entire generations of scholar-students ended up joining political movements, student politics degraded campus safety and cohesion, and society politicized to such a degree that state capacity degraded severely, and made Singaporean and Malaysian style "Asian Democracy" to be viewed as a viable option. Heck, LKY, Goh Chok Tong, and other Singaporean policymakers mentored Narendra Modi back when he was CM of Gujarat.

A similar transition is slowly happening in the US as well.