They require the same "economic" power to uplift out of poverty,
its not as if 2 of those 3 were tiny, but strategically placed ports vs china, with a literal continent's worth of people
They require the same "economic" power to uplift out of poverty,
its not as if 2 of those 3 were tiny, but strategically placed ports vs china, with a literal continent's worth of people
Right? Two of the states on the graph are literally port cities, one of which was literally part of the British Empire, another of the states is a small island propped up/exploited for cheap labor by the US, and the last one is a massive, mostly rural country that started with next to no heavy industry and a populace that had been deliberately kept illiterate and uneducated by its old aristocratic and nationalist ruling class.
Although now I'm curious what the same metrics applied to, say, Beijing or other major cities in China would say, because the relative underdevelopment and poverty of China's massive rural population has been a constant issue for China for a bunch of reasons ranging from the conflict between its dependence on a large rural labor pool for food production and the constant flow of labor from rural areas into cities (that is to say, rural poverty makes people want to move to cities instead, but if everyone who wanted to did then it would cause a famine because there wasn't enough rural labor for agriculture), to outright armed uprisings demanding better conditions and more equitable returns on the food they produce, hence why a lot of their modern programs are specifically aimed at eliminating rural poverty and building out the sort of infrastructure and development in rural areas that's needed to accomplish that.
Edit: also look at how Hong Kong spiked upwards on the graph after being handed over to China, China stagnated for a full decade during the onset of liberalization before returning to a rate of improvement slightly than it's pre-liberalization rate and then started rapidly increasing in the past decade as more left wing elements of the CPC came into power and replaced some of the more liberal elements. I'm sort of curious what the same data for more recent years would show, considering the large poverty-reduction programs that they carried out in the past few years.
Don’t forget mainland China had also been looted for a century and in a state of war/occupation for the 75 years preceding this graph.
And to your second point, there are now cities in China larger than HK or Singapore that didn’t even exist when this graph starts.
That's a major contributing factor as to why China was so relatively underdeveloped as of the revolution, yes. And for a sense of just how little industry they had at that point, in 1950 China's entire steel production was less than that of Russia in 1917 (and the comparative underdevelopment of Russia is often something that left anticommunists point to when saying "lOoK hOw It WaS dOoMeD fRoM tHe StArT! sHamE iT dIdN't HaPpEn SoMeWhErE cIvIlIzEd InStEaD!"), and a lot of the heavy industry that they did have was aging factories built by the Japanese in Manchuria during its occupation (and using those factories was an ideological sticking point for the CPC, because they basically couldn't be operated without mimicking the sort of abusive and extractive methods that they were built for).
The old aristocracy also contributed to the problems, particularly when it came to education which was systematically denied to most of the population (and as a side note, that created some interesting policies on the part of the CPC in the early 1950s: despite the popular idea of mass purges of elites, bourgeoisie, and landlords a lot of them wound up cutting deals with the CPC to hand over their capital and land to the state in exchange for bureaucratic positions since they were literate and the newly formed state desperately needed literate bureaucrats immediately).
Yeah, I'm just curious how those numbers would line up, since China's cities specifically would probably be starting at or above the point Hong Kong started at, and probably growing faster except for during certain periods. China's development has just been so uneven between rural and urban areas that mashing the stats for both together creates a number that's fundamentally dishonest for both.
That, at least, is also true of Taiwan
Except the KMT did one final looting on its way from the mainland and took the entire treasury and diplomatic ties with it