The reaction of a society to a forced drug epedemic will create 2nd and 3rd order effects (like a closed society) that are very easy to criticize today by people who are unaware of one of the largest poisonings in modern history (done by Roosevelts and Forbes family) ...but I digress.
Most damning of all, Mao's bad economic policies directly killed more than 35 million people, mostly through starvation. He killed more people than Stalin or Hitler.
But the CCP does not discuss these much. It's harder to accept that another 30 years of humiliation (from 1949 to 1979) was the leadership of China shooting itself in the foot.
Remember that second and third order effects are difficult to measure. EVERYTHING is first, second, third etc order effect of something that happened in the past. China's current growth can only occur in the post WW2 US world order that allows all nations to lift themselves out of poverty through trade.
For other readers: parent account is 10 months old with only 1 other comment. This is an indication of a 50 cent army member or at least someone who has been influenced by CCP propaganda, which has grains of truth but systematically exaggerates the influence of certain things.
It is though an interesting question to what China would be like if the Opium Wars never happened.
Many historians believe reversal of this treaty caused Pearl Harbor and started WW2.
Quite embarassing for the Nobel Prize winning Roosevelts indeed.
https://www.c-span.org/video/?290682-1/the-imperial-cruise
Most people don't know history, so it's easy to sweep under the rug.
I agree that great power horse trading before and after WW1 has caused a lot of issues. A rules based world order is an improvement on that. I wish USA followed the rules and did not invade nations such as Iraq.
I forgot to mention relative GDP is a bad measure. Absolute GDP (on a log scale) is a much better measure. The relative GDP graph will falsely make it look like India and China declined far worse than they did around 200 years ago. The reason is the industrial revolutions, which separated population size from a nation's GDP (at least until recent globalization). One nation growing due to industrial revolution by itself does not make a stagnating non industrial economy weaker in absolute terms.
I think a large fraction of that relative decline would have happened even if there was not an absolute decline due to misdeeds of certain British and American people in the 1800s.
Industrial revolution works even better if all prevailing exporters all of a sudden fall off a cliff.
"Mean reversion", word of the century.
Interesting bonus fact for economic historians, in 1890, 30% of Britain's GDP was illegal opium smuggling to China.
Would be interesting to see the numbers for the USA (by some accounts, the biggest exporter by that point)...
Courtesy of Aaron Swartz: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3112527
I will retort, however, that we Americans should not take our technological dominance for granted, just as a precious generation of carmakers and related industries had to learn what happens when foreign competitors (especially with government support) eat up domestic markets that companies like Ford and GM thought belonged to them forever.
I’m not suggesting that in 20 years Americans will do all their social networking on RenRen or shopping on Alibaba, but there are many, many high tech companies most people have never heard of, churning out profits and paying the taxes that support our society. The more talented, US-educated non-citizens we turn away after graduation, the harder it is for domestic high tech firms to form and hire.
And another thing to note: just because the rest of the world is getting wealthier doesn’t mean they’ll share our values. The biggest geopolitical fucky-wucky of the post-Cold War era was the assumption that Chinese people would demand more freedoms like we have in the West as their living standards approach ours.
China owns A LOT of Hollywood. How many big budget films these days criticize China or make them the bad guys? I grew up watching films that stamped “Russian” and “villain” as inseparable qualities in my impressionable, young American mind - at least until 9/11 happened and the Russians and Arabs changed jerseys.
The economic development of China has been nothing short of a miracle for the hundreds of millions of poor farmers lifted out of extreme poverty, but at what cost to us?