• Zuzak [fae/faer, she/her]
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    edit-2
    1 year ago

    China's industrialization and rise in life expectancy did not require Mao Zedong thought, but it did require someone who was interested in doing it, and the nationalists weren't, nor were the invading Japanese, nor were the various warlord factions following the collapse of the Qing, nor were the Qing, nor were the European colonizers. Every one of those factions only wanted to loot the country for the short term benefit of their ruling elite. Any one of them could have accomplished a similar miracle, but they chose not to. Obviously, it was industrialization that brought about the bulk of the benefits, but there are reasons why China had not previously achieved its potential on that front. It would've been better if China had been led by someone who didn't have big brained ideas like killing all the sparrows, but like I said, despite these mistakes the general trend is clearly positive.

    Not every country experienced the same rise in life expectancy or industrialization after WWII, no. Even today, many parts of the world experience food insecurity and over 700 million people live in extreme poverty, so I have no idea what you're on about. Of course, the idea that China would've experienced the same level of growth without the CPC is an unfalsifiable counterfactual, but we can plainly see the trend of a lack of growth prior to communist control in the graph I posted.

    Here's what the infamous communist propaganda rag The World Bank has to say:

    Over the past 40 years, the number of people in China with incomes below $1.90 per day – the International Poverty Line as defined by the World Bank to track global extreme poverty– has fallen by close to 800 million. With this, China has contributed close to three-quarters of the global reduction in the number of people living in extreme poverty. At China’s current national poverty line, the number of poor fell by 770 million over the same period.

    Let me put it another way: how would the world look different to you if China was successful in alleviating poverty vs if it wasn't? How much information about the life of an average rural Chinese person actually makes its way to your feed? That's not an accusation or anything, there's lots of stuff happening everywhere around the world and no one can be expected to keep track of everything. It's just an observation that there are a lot of people, not just in China but all around the world, whose perspectives don't get proportionate representation in Western media or high school textbooks. It might be worthwhile to consider whether there are important details that have been omitted or deemphasized in the narrative you were taught.