It should not be ignored that “growing pains” means ~10 million dead from state-caused famines and imprisoned for thought crimes.

Even by official Chinese numbers ~10 million is a pretty low estimate. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Leap_Forward Wikipedia has it as "between 15 and 55 million" deaths just to the Great Leap Forward alone.

Yes, the transition to modernity was almost as much of a shock for China as it was for the west. Nonetheless, the net effect is raising about 800 million people out of poverty in a little over a generation, an achievement that has no historical precedent.

>Nonetheless, the net effect is raising about 800 million people out of poverty in a little over a generation, an achievement that has no historical precedent.

Taiwan, Singapore and Korea started from around the same starting point as China after World War Two, and all became developed countries much faster (compare their GDP per capita now to China's). You could say "their populations aren't as big as China", but in that case wouldn't the ideal solution have been to split China up into a bunch of smaller countries that could grow just as fast as Korea etc?

Din't US dump tons of money in South Koreea?

What? What sort of mental gymnastics is this?

All the "East Asian Tiger" countries achieved much faster economic development in terms of GDP per capita (per head) than China did: search for China, Hong Kong, Singapore and Korea on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi....

There's no theoretical reason a political region should develop slower if the population is larger, if anything economic theory suggests the opposite (a common argument for why America's GDP is higher than Europe's is that it has a larger homogenous internal market). So China's size can't be used as an excuse for its slower development.

China didn't really attempt to start the process of increasing until the late 70s to early 80s. Their cultural revolution was focused on rooting out hidden vestiges of the old power structures before attempting to modernize. Since that point their growth rate has been quicker, they just got started later.

> Since that point their growth rate has been quicker, they just got started later.

That's not true. You can see the historical growth rates for China and Korea here: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.KD.ZG?end=2... . China's growth rate at no point in time was greater than Korea's was in the 1970s and 1980s.

What? The highest points on that graph are Chinese. And there are similar Chinese bursts to the Korean one you're talking about, followed by China sustaining higher growth.

Are we looking at the same graph?

The highest single point is China, followed by a very low point the following year. If you average the growth rate over 3-5 year period their maximum rates are similar.

Well, the highest four points on the graph are Chinese. Yes you can cherry pick a three year period that makes Korea look good, but you can do the same with China.

You reject population as a factor in modernization (along with, apparently, initial development level, initial education level, initial infrastructure, etc.) and you offer instead... longitude? Why are you comparing China to Singapore?

China developed more slowly than its neighbors, unsurprising given the communist party’s crushing of free communication and enterprise and the killing of tens of millions of people. You’ve gotta be playing really dumb to pretend there’s anything complicated about that.

"Neighbors"? Singapore is 2000km from the closest part of China! I'm not "playing" dumb; in this entire thread you have given us no reason to expect Singapore and China to have similar modernization performance. Less charitable people than myself might suspect that your personal reason is one you can't mention in polite company.

>"Neighbors"? Singapore is 2000km from the closest part of China! I'm not "playing" dumb; in this entire thread you have given us no reason to expect Singapore and China to have similar modernization performance.

Sorry, what does relevance geographic proximity have to economic growth? The point is that those countries all have similar cultural and racial backgrounds to China, yet developed much faster.

Obviously, relative proximity has very little to do with economic growth. No one ITT ever mentioned any other unifying factor, so I was being charitable by suggesting it. You seem less sophisticated than 'woah, in that you've openly stated the racial assumption that 'woah left unsaid.

Are you seriously calling people racist for comparing China with the islands and peninsulas surrounding it? Is it racist to compare Germany with England?

If you invoked race as an explanation for e.g. why South Korea and Taiwan had similar modernization experiences, that would be weird but maybe not obviously wrong. Among the dozens of other similarities between these two nations, race as perceived by white Americans is one similarity. It's not the most salient similarity to reasonable people, but there's no inherent contradiction involved.

That's not what's going on ITT. China has had a different modernization experience from the other nations discussed above, which is entirely understandable given their very different histories, assets, infrastructures, populations, demographics, educations, etc. Your racism is that you ignore all those obvious differences in favor of one trivial, contingent aspect in which to an ineducable white American they might seem similar.

In an effort to silence legitimate criticism of a totalitarian regime, you are making the assertion that comparing a country to its neighbors is racist. Amazing.

Dude this thread is buried under several flagged posts. No one is reading this. No one will care about racism here. The things we're saying won't silence anyone.

However, you could still learn something. When you compare two different groups of people, be sure to have something besides "they have the same skin color" to say when someone asks the obvious follow-up question.

Huh? China literally slowed its pace of development intentionally so they didn’t kill millions more. They learned that the Great Leap Forward was too fast so they slowed it down and made it a multi-decade project. Interior China was largely subsistence farming 50 years ago and now boasts some of the largest cities in the world. They have industrialized incredibly quickly given the scale of the challenge. You can’t bootstrap enough industry to modernize 1.6 billion people overnight; it takes decades to build.

They haven’t gone faster because a country like Singapore can buy enough industrial output from Japan or the US to bootstrap their industry. Nobody has enough spare capacity to build at the scale of China, so the Chinese had to cultivate industry over a period of decades. Given that most of the worlds manufacturing is done there now, I’d say they’ve been quite successful.

So what we are saying is that the dropping of socialism and adoption of capitalism lifted 800 million people out of poverty in a generation? I don't think that's a bad review of capitalism at all.

Sure, but that only happened after they abandoned the communist economic system.

Under Mao, it was constant famine, genocides, and wars.

Yeah, that’s what happens when you try to undo 200 years of colonial rule. It’s actually a surprisingly low number as a percentage of population when compared to Russia or Eastern Europe.

That's ridiculous. Most of the deaths were due to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Leap_Forward; how could any part of that be justified as "undoing 200 years of colonial rule"? That wasn't even a justification used by the Commmunist Party at the time.

Well, when the youth wing of Lumumbians started practicing a nutritionary democracy (that is, murdered and had a nurse from the West for dinner) this was exactly the justification used by the socialists. "They are undoing the colonial rule", -- they said. That's even more ridiculous and yet they find this theory convincing. So, I don't think it can be helped.

There’s no playbook for undoing colonial rule at mass scale. Said colonial rule prevented China from participating in the industrial revolution, so converting an agrarian economy to an industrial one is in fact undoing colonial rule.

So yeah, they made mistakes and a lot of people died. I’m not going to glorify Mao but you can’t argue with results. The Great Leap Forward largely succeeded, they just realized it needed to be rolled out at a smaller scale over a longer period of time.

By what metric did it succeed? China's GDP per capita is still around a quarter of comparable countries like Japan, Korea, Taiwan and Singapore.

Yeah just like those American mass famines after the revolutionary war. Completely inevitable.

This comment reads like dialogue from a character in a Philip K. Dick novel.

By this logic, the USA (a much younger country) is also simply experiencing growing pains, nullifying your point.

That's disingenuous. The government of China, People's Republic of China, has only been around since 1949 and even if you include the ROC's mainland tenure that only extends it back to 1912.

China got lifted out of poverty after they abandoned communism and transitioned to a mixed economy with respect for private property rights. So I'm not sure what your point is.

They're an Authoritarian Capitalist state.

Exactly! One should not confound their economic model (communism, capitalist, socialist) with their governing model (authoritarian, democratic).

Their decisions to massacre people are purely authoritarian, while their economic policies look very capitalist.

Sure, they have some socialist policies, but so do Norway, Germany and Mexico.

Who's they? USA or China or ...?

>Yeah to everyone who says “communism is fundamentally flawed” I just point to China.

As your proof it's flawed, right? Right?

They eventually moved to a capitalist economic system with totalitarian tendencies, no different than the mafia if the mafia were technocrats.

Check out this story.

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/social-injustice/

TL;DR: a thought experiment: for an exam, take the average of every student's grade, and give it to all students.

By, say, the 3rd exam, all of the class will fail.

In ninth grade my biology teacher took a vote about whether to do this for one test. I voted against it (in the minority). It didn’t take three tests to see the effect. Immediately people stopped studying for the test. We failed. The teacher cheated and gave us all a C.

What does an apocryphal story about a highly simplified and disingenuous demonstration of socialism have to do with anything?

Ok, cool. Despite Snopes saying that never happened, China doesn’t do that; in fact they have more billionaires than the US. It’s almost like they learned from the failures of other communist states and adapted their system.

What they have done is create a base standard of living that is dependent on location. They can’t move every rural farmer to urban population centers all at once, so they’ve been doing it gradually over time. Do a lot of Chinese live in poverty? Yeah, but they’ve been living in poverty for a few hundred years. A lot fewer live in poverty in 2021 than in 1990.

Why would you want to move farmers to cities where they cant farm? who would do the farming then? why not just pay farmers what you would pay a factory worker in the city?

Trying to force this doesn't make sense to me.

Because agricultural modernization universally requires at least an order of magnitude less labor, and society is then better served by those workers being in urban centers where they can work first in factories then transition to a service economy for the ones who'll work unskilled labor, and concentrate access to quality education for the ones that can contribute intellectually.

Those "ghost cities" that the media pearl clutched for a while there have for the most part been slowly filled in with previously agrarian workers making the urban transition.