It's still a true story...nothing diminishes the significance of this.

The achievement is ... Mao died?

And probably Deng Xiaoping's re-architecture of China.

Still, what caused the advance does not diminish the success of humanity. Progress is progress.

"Progress is progress. "

It is? Don't you think, there can also be progress in the wrong direction?

Wouldn't "bad leader dies, next one has better economic policies" make the situation improve by a lot in most poor places?

Yes and this is not exclusive to developing countries either.

Nah, you threw the baby out with the bath water there; the other East Asian countries that embraced the west became much much richer much much faster after WWII.

China just managed to dramatically shit itself from the Great Leap Forward through to the early 90s, and is now undergoing the growth spurt that it’s Eastern neighbours experienced decades previously.

They are also much smaller. If you compare China to India it didn’t do that badly after all

I think that if I had to live through the second half of the 20th century in either place I'd take India's moderate socialism followed by a slight loosening over China's extremes. Even if China is in a better position right this moment, it lost a lot of people getting there.

You might want to tell the BJP voter base that

This is not true. The same trend holds across the rest of the world.

https://ourworldindata.org/the-global-decline-of-extreme-pov...

Still it means world ex-China went from being 30% poor to 10% poor (1050M out of 3400M in 1980 and 640M out of 6400M now). Great achievement nonetheless. While yes, most spectacular in China. That's what happens when you scrap Communism and manage to not break everything else in the process (and yes, also hack your way there quite a bit, creating quite a few long-term liabilities that will backfire soon).

Even if you look at the last 500 years fewer people live at near subsistence level today than they did in the past.

Which country is historically poor? I don't understand. If we consider a native, self sustaining civilisation as "poor" because they don't have the technology (whether that is a horse cart or a computer) that we have and they can't buy it at the currency rate that we fix, I dont think it qualifies as poor. I think it's time we should get comfortable with the fact that happiness is not always material things but it's relative material things. We may have eased our physical effort with technology but most of us spend in gym or track to probably spend the same amount of energy. Of course we can't go back once we are lifted out of the "poverty " except to spend half our savings as that vacation on the hut at an exotic beach or wildlife safari, cursing our hectic career & life :)