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.