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this post was submitted on 20 Aug 2023
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China is only doing so well on the back of declining manufacturing in the west. Nixon should never have normalized relations with them.
Then why isn’t India doing as well as China economically? They had the same chance to undercut US labor costs in order to industrialize. However, they could not capitalize on that opportunity as successfully as China did. It’s almost as if Chinese economic policy and central planning played a large role in their development. It’s also pretty clear that China is actually become less dependent on US demand as their own internal economy grows.
This isn’t a one time experiment either. Vietnam is following a similar path and has grown much faster than many comparable south east asian countries.
Yes, I don't doubt that the totalitarian CCP took full advantage of the opportunity to grow their economy to what it is now. And they did that through state controlled capitalism and gross human rights violations.
I don't doubt they are smart, but the methods they have used, ie being a single party authoritarian state, are barbaric. It was a mistake to help China succeed as we did.
Think about it this way, if you were a Chinese citizen would you rather work in a harsh factory setting or work as a subsistence farmer and risk starvation because it didn’t rain enough one year? Because that was literally the choice. There were no other options.
The reason why the Chinese government maintains a high level of support from Chinese citizens is not because they’re great propagandists. Rather it’s because hundreds of millions of people went from extreme poverty as peasants to living stable middle class lives within a few decades.
Why do you see that as such a bad thing? Would you prefer all these people remain in poverty as they have in other countries such as India or the Philippines? I don’t get it.
I don't see capitalism raising people out of poverty as bad. It's one of the greatest achievements of capitalism.
The way they implemented it is the problem, and clearly not everyone is happy about it as we see in Tiannemen square and, more recently, the way Chinese citizens developed a coded vocabulary to express their discontent.