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20% of the worlds prison population
(lemmy.ml)
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this post was submitted on 20 Jun 2025
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From: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Chinese_Famine
(Emphasis mine.)
Also, regardless of the reason my other points stand: having millions of poor people starve to death will reduce you incarceration rate, and people might choose to live in a country with a higher incarceration rate if it means they don't starve to death.
From Wikipedia. Western scholars exaggerate the human factors and minimize the environmental, which were the cause.
From Prolewiki:
China did not have a famine because of communism. China had a natural famine and while some policies strengthened it, others minimized it.
To be perfectly clear, I don't subscribe to the notion that communism is bad and capitalism is good. I think every socio-economic system has pros and cons and are prone different forms of degredation and usurption.
I think the people leading a country and the people that comprise its society have a larger impact on life than their system of government.
With that said, a government is ultimately responsible for the safety and well-being of its people.
It's the system that determines how its run, not the people at the top. Your analysis is teetering into Great Man Theory territory, which is derived from Idealism, not Materialism. The mode of production is primary.
Secondly, yes, the government is responsible. Is the government also responsible for drought, though? What should be judged is that, as I stated, food production was dramatically improved, and the government eliminated famine in a country where famine was common prior to Socialism.
For what it's worth, capitalism is progressive compared to feudalism, but regressive as compared to socialism.
That is the catch. It only determines how it is run if the people at the top are following the system. The system is supposed to determine that, but if everyone in positions of power decide to disregard what the system is supposed to be, then suddenly the system that a government used to have or advertises as having, no longer represents the actual state of affairs.
Responsibility means owning an outcome. If I take responsibility for the safety of your children and a meteorite literally falls out of the sky and kills them, I am still responsible. I'm not going to try to make excuses and make sure you know it wasn't my fault and there wasn't anything I could have done. I was responsible. Your kids are dead. The buck stops with me. That's what actual leaders do, they own the outcome.
No, this is wrong. An economic system is a physical thing, it isn't a group of ideas everyone agrees to follow. People can break laws and whatnot, but fundamentally the system is a physical thing. Your analysis is Idealist, not Materialist.
The CPC does acknowledge problems with the Great Chinese Famine, but you trying to pin it entirely on the CPC is wrong, as well as the idea that the CPC didn't incarcerate as many people per capita is because of the famine. This is nonsense. Most countries do not imprison nearly as many people as the US does, and the PRC isn't different in that respect.
How is that nonsense? What was the per-capita incarceration rate of the population who died in the famine? What was the per-capita incarceration rate of the population that didn't die in the famine?
There is probably no data for that, so we can't know for sure, but I showed that in the U.S. a large famine would result in a lower incarceration rate because poor people would starve at a disproportionate rate, and poor people are also incarerated at a disproportnate rate, so that would reduce the overall rate per capita. This doesn't necessarily apply to the situation in China, but I don't think it is nonsense with no foundation in logic.
You'd need the rate to multiply by five times to be equal. You have a hypothesis and no proof behind it, yet you treat it like it would multiply the incarceration rate by over five times had there been no famine. All this really amounts to is "PRC bad" for the sake of it.
I never said it would make it equal. In fact, I'm confident that it would not.
The whole reason we started this argument is because you made a condescending comment implying either that I can't read, or that I don't understand what rate per-100,000 means. I understand what per-100,000 means, but I also understand that not all groups of 100,000 people are the same; removing a large sub-population of people that doesn't exactly match the overall population's average will result in a change to the overall population average.
If you have a total population (T), and you are measuring the rate of an event (E), then E / T gives your average event rate for the total population, which you can then normalize to a per-X number. For example: T = 1000 people E = 10 incarcerations. 10 / 1000 = .01, normalized to per 100 capita would be 1 per 100 people on average, from the total population.
If you have a sub-demographic in that population (Ts), and it has a different rate of an event (Es) then its rate is also Es / Ts. For example: Ts = 100 poor-people Es = 5 incarcerations. 5 / 100 = .05, normalized to a per 100 capita would be 5 people per 100 on average, for that sub-population.
If you suddenly remove that sub-population, what happens to the rate of the overall population? That's easy to calculate: (E - Es) / (T - Ts) (10 - 5) / (1000 - 100) = 5 / 900 = .0055, normalized to a per 100 capita would be .55.
Suggesting that a sub-demographic doesn't perfectly match the per-capita average of an entire population and that removing them would change the overall per-capita rate isn't nonsense.
The only purpose of your comment was to be a contrarion, and an anti-communist. Again, you have a hypothesis, but no proof, inequality was far lower in the PRC than the US and as such the idea of the most impoverished being hit isn't really as accurate. There wasn't the same instrument where the impoverished are driven to crime out of desparation that exists in the US, while there was still poverty in the PRC, it was far more even.
Again, you have a hypothesis, but no proof.
Had the original post simply pointed out that America's incarceration rate is horrible, I would have no disagreement with it, but instead it chose to make a direct comparison between present-day America and China during the Cultural Revolution.
My primary disagreement with this comparison is not with that fact that present-day America has a higher reported incarceration rate than China during the Cultural Revolution, it is the fact that to an audience that may not study history, it helps craft the narrative that China during the 1960s was a much nicer place to live than present-day America because the incarceration rate was significantly lower. I thought it was worth mentioning that, regardless of why it happened, or if anyone was at fault, one of the largest famines in human history occurred in China immediately preceding this time period, which made it not a very nice place to live. There are things worse than incarceration, and most people, myself included, would choose life in a U.S. prison over starvation. Not that either choice is a good once.
My secondary disagreement was with the implication that I don't know how basic statistics work. I suggested that a massive removal of poor-people from a population could have reduced the overall incarceration rate. You said that this was "nonsense". Not that there is insufficient data, or that it wouldn't be a very significant change. My burden of proof is not, probable, or possible, it is just above the level of nonsense. Or do you retract your previous statement that I made a nonsensical argument?
Nah, I don't retract my statement. Everyone who read this post knows about the Great Chinese Famine. Nobody is unaware of it. The point of the post is that the PRC is, in general, less willing to willy-nilly imprispn people, which is true, and reflected both during the Cultural Revolution and today. The point isn't to paint the PRC as a paradise, but to show that even during difficult times, the PRC was less inclined to mass-imprison people than the US Empire is, which is correct, and you came here trying to make it seem like it was a bad thing.
I think it's rather chauvanistic to try to say it's better to live imprisoned in a developed country than non-imprisoned in a developing country, a developing country that managed to double life expectancy under Mao even when famine was included thanks to the rapid development and dramatic improvements in equality and social services.
That's not what I said. I said it is better to live imprisoned in the U.S. than to starve to death.
Ok, well if you aren't even going to concede that a rational argument, as incorrect as it might be, isn't nonsense, then I don't think we will be able to have any meaningful discourse.
I wish you well. Good luck with your Marxist endeavors.
You're implying several things here:
The PRC would have imprisoned just as many people as the US, except the people starved to death.
Premise 1 requires everyone to have starved to have been meant for imprisonment
Premise 1 and 2 are comparisons of the prisons of a developed country to the living conditions of a rapidly developing country lifting itself out of feudalism.
This isn't a rational argument! I already said you had a hypothesis you wanted to test, but you keep pretending it has valid conclusions despite not doing the legwork!
A rational argument is an argument that follows some sort of logical thought process, it has nothing to do with whether the conclusion is correct or not.
This is a rational argument:
Premise 2 is false, and premise 3 is unknown, so the conclusion is false, but it follows a logical thought process and isn't nonsense.
This is nonsense and irrational:
There is no discernible logic or rational thought process. It is just apparently random statements with no connection.
Again, since we can't even agree on commonly accepted definitions for basic concepts, we just aren't going to be able to have any kind of productive conversation.
Good day.
This is splitting hairs to justify a fubdamentally irrational argument based on false conclusions. I agree about one thing, though, this isn't a productive conversation.