beyond everything I just have no idea where people get this stuff. like clearly they never got it from an actual book, there's no actual mapping to real events good or bad. this is what happens when you learn 20th century history from reddit threads
It's a vague mishmash of half remembered facts linked together by "logical inferences" (making shit up).
Failure of the 4 pests campaign = dabbling and experimentation. Deaths during cultural revolution = millions of deaths (it's communism so it's always millions of deaths). Pol Pot killed the intelligencia, but they're too racist to remember who all these foreigners are, so they feel safe attributing it to Mao. There was a famine, so it was probably caused by industrialisation (they don't actually know what the 4 pests campaign was, so don't know it caused the famine).
It's always funny to me when Westerners can't even conceive of why anyone would support the Chinese government. Imagine being a middle-aged Chinese person who watched all this happen. Within living memory, you went from the tail end of the century of humiliation, emerging from under the heel of Western hegemony, and now you're a world superpower of unprecedented independence from that hegemony. For the first time in the history of the colonial world, a country of the oppressed has risen up by its own power to challenge the oppressors that have spent the past 400 years immiserating every non-white country on earth. They went from ox carts to high speed rail in one lifetime. From colonial humiliation, to unprecedented pride and dignity for the first counterhegemonic force outside the West in the history of capitalism. They can look around themselves and see several examples of countries like India and Myanmar that didn't choose communism, couldn't challenge the West, didn't have a cultural revolution (it was a mixed bag of very good and very bad) and they can see, clear as day, where their path led them vs the path the West would have preferred for them. Vassalage. Poverty. Exploitation. Rural idiocy, as Lenin put it. The path the West still wants to put them back on.
beyond everything I just have no idea where people get this stuff. like clearly they never got it from an actual book, there's no actual mapping to real events good or bad. this is what happens when you learn 20th century history from reddit threads
It's a vague mishmash of half remembered facts linked together by "logical inferences" (making shit up).
Failure of the 4 pests campaign = dabbling and experimentation. Deaths during cultural revolution = millions of deaths (it's communism so it's always millions of deaths). Pol Pot killed the intelligencia, but they're too racist to remember who all these foreigners are, so they feel safe attributing it to Mao. There was a famine, so it was probably caused by industrialisation (they don't actually know what the 4 pests campaign was, so don't know it caused the famine).
—u/Gravelord-_Nito
All you have to do is look at a graph of any quality of life indicator in China to disprove this. Like every single one is just
after 1949
a lotta youtube i figure