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Effectiveness is about achieving goals, it's quite possible to be very effective while working towards evil goals.
Yes, but it was effectively half measure anyway - they bought some time at expense of poverty and got nothing in the long run - the union is gone, poverty killed what nationalism was not able to and with fall of the union nationalism came back with 6 more millions of reasons to prove it.
Chinese have not been strongly ideological after Deng Xiaoping.
Communist party is more like ruling aristocracy with privileges. Communist party is using communism the same way as aristocracy used religion to justify their divine mandate.
What is true though is that institutionally China is much smarter about economics and less ideological than in Mao's era, but that is predicated on retaining institutional norms and memory past Xi and his ostensibly tactical rollback. It could totally work out in a worse way.
Wherever recent history has gone awry is when a few powerful people think they know what's best for everyone else.
Just like I said in other comment, Look at the post war economies in Europe, Japan, Korea etc. Wage controls, price controls, rationing etc. still a market economy and not a command economy.
Note, this is still not a suggestion to do it, for humanist reasons, which I think is mostly what the Western (cultural) objection has always been. But from a practical perspective, centralization (even totalitarianism) has been accepted as the norm in various smaller and non-governmental contexts that have also involved highly complex decision-making, e.g. the corporate employer. People seem to accept this level of de-individualization, and a strong evidentiary case has yet to be put forth that full decentralization of that relationship works out better over all.
I think it's pretty obvious by now that individuals' feelings of being 'free' are not relevant to the big picture of what nation states seek to achieve. If you tasked an AI with controlling a country to achieve arbitrary goals, you can be damn sure it would be totalitarian for maximum efficiency.
I don't support or condone totalitarian governments and I value my freedoms, however illusionary they may be. But I have no delusions about what the optimal governance structure is.
On what meaningful per capita metrics is China outpacing the Western world?
Hell yeah, America has a mass-murder problem. Its just ignorant of the fact because .. you know .. nobody likes to know how their powerful military is really being used.
Yeah, but a planned economy wasn't the reason. The reasons were:
(a) they wanted to establish their elite rule (and that required a big show of force and getting rid of potential enemies)
(b) ideology was at play (ethnic tensions, coming up with a BS "elite class" to get rid of in the form of kulacs, etc)
(c) they started from very poor rural economies very fragile to weather, famines, and such
(d) they improvised their decisions with much incomplete data from ad-hoc established regional bureaucracies.
Those are not problems with a "planned economy", but more of those particular historical circumstances.
Neither (a), (b), or (c), or (d) are the case anymore (I mean, they still need to enforce their party rule, but not establish it from nothing).
In fact China's growth in GDP the last 50+ years has been phenomenal, so it's not like "they made very, very poor decisions" for their economy over this span.
Besides, today China's economy is not at all planned the same hard way Stalin's Russia or Mao's economy was.
The soviets and Mao's regimes had ample powers to do what they wanted, yet it resulted in mass murder and complete catastrophe at unprecedented scale because they made very, very poor decisions. Having leverage does not mean it fits prosperity nor crisis. Look at how soviets encouraged the killing of Kulaks which led to the great starvation (dozens of millions of deaths) in Ukraine in the following years.