Or maybe it wouldn't have taken so long. ;p

If you consider 50 years to go from having <10% literacy to >99%, while also stabilizing an entire nation's food supply, and becoming an economic super power on par with EU/US then I hate to see what you consider fast.

Oh we should also talk about their entire coastal region we’re devistaed by land war and Japanese occupation.

There were horrible problems that derailed progress, it's pointless to deny them. On the other hand, some of the suffering came externally, like sanctions and embargoes designed to make life miserable and induce the country to fail/the regime to collapse. Also military threats that depleted meager resources and made normal investment impossible.

What can be said is that, given this set of very difficult challenges, whether self-induced or not, the outcome, such as it is, is a commendable one.

I don't have a source for this, but my understanding is that much of the improvement in China's literacy rate came from the government's redefining of "literate" down to about a 1st or 2nd grade school level.

Still, I can't help but be happy at how so many people's lives have improved so greatly in such a short time.

Simplified Chinese made a huge difference. It's one of the few undeniably good things to come from the CCP, although adopting a phonetic alphabet might have been even better.

Japan was devistates by WW2 also, but they bounced back quickly. China being one of the most powerful (and richest) countries in the world is actually not that unusual considering world history.

google translate converts this to:

Without the Communist Party, There Would Be No New China

But considering the party that the communists replaced were the Nationalists... who are in control of Taiwan.. which is even richer per capita than China (31k/person)... that seems unlikely.

Can you explain more why the Nationalists were successful in Taiwan, but you believe they wouldn't have been in China?

Edit: this is not to say that I believe the Nationalists would have been more successful than the Communists in China.. China is certainly a far larger task, both in building out a larger country and pulling more poeple out of poverty. So this is a sincere question about your opinion on the nationalists.

I say this as somebody who has had multiple-hour long debates with people on whether China would have been better off under the Nationalists. Despite ambivalence toward the Nationalists mixed with loathing for Chiang Kai Shek, I've always passionately advocated that China would be better off if the Nationalists had triumphed.

With that said, I can think of two (good) reasons people might think that China's current rise could not have happened under the Nationalists.

1. The Nationalists were extremely poor at stamping out corruption and warlordism. China appears to have been too large a region for them to competently exercise control. Their success in Taiwan therefore may be partly attributable to a smaller landmass over which they were more capable of exercising competent hegemony.

2. Taiwan's success is partly a result of their gradual liberalisation. It's hard to say whether this same liberalisation could have taken place on the mainland.

That said, like I mentioned, I think it's hard to argue that China wouldn't have been better off. Certainly in the short term. Without the Communists taking power you avoid every atrocity under Mao. That alone is hard to offset with any later (pseudo-)unity and progress.

US military and economic support for the ROC may have been a much smaller priority too if the mainland hadn't "gone red". But then again if the ROC had won the mainland, they probably wouldn't have poured resources into the Korean War.

And so on... it's a fascinating sequence of hypotheticals.

Yeah definitely. Although I've argued the US would probably have poured funds in as a buffer against Russia. Especially given the relationship between USSR and Guomintang was not 100% unambiguously hostile, so the US would want to make sure they weren't tempted to flip by USSR assistance.

I think that the role US money played in Taiwan's success is vastly overplayed anyway. The US basically abandoned them to their fate until the Korean war kicked off.

It's always a fascinating set of hypotheticals like you said.

I don’t believe they’d be successful in China because they weren’t historically.

Also we can compare how a nationalist, democratic, and capitalist country of similar size, population, colonial explotation, and natural resource wealth would fair in India. Which again makes the PRC come out rosey.

Ignoring whether I would choose 'Capitalist' as the first word to describe India's economy, India is still a bad comparison. The only reason it's even democratic is because it inherited British institutions. Taiwan built its democratic institutions from the ground up itself, after and during decades of military dictatorship, it's a completely different situation.