I'm celebrating the increase in life expectancy from 35 to higher than that of the US, actually, which is the win I think it is.

The point is not the immediate increase in that specific 5 year period, the point is the clear trend of rapid, long term increases after a long period of stagnation, with the pivitol turning point being exactly when the CPC came to power. You're supposed to look at the whole graph.

My god he can't read a graph. How has our educational system been allowed to fail for this long?

I'm not committed at all to China as the salvation of the communist project, but it's exactly this sort of self-imposed illiteracy and ignorance, and nearly religious faith in the inferiority and duplicity of The Orient that makes me default to distrusting anything negative a cracker says about it.