I am used to anarchist arguments. This is a good thread to explain my understanding.

Citing the English, French, Dutch, Portuguese, Spanish is not whataboutism (German and Belgian, sure), because all of these countries were actively mass murdering people in China, India, and the rest of Asia for several centuries before Mao showed up. We're not operating in a vacuum here, where Mao killed millions and before him there was no mass murder based on hierarchy. Mao's project was explicitly resistance against a multi-century mass murdering international hierarchy that was directly occupying the major population centers in the region, murdering through both direct and indirect violence, and continuing to strengthen their control over the people there.

Mao raised a peasant army to fight back, not only against the hierarchal foreign oppressors but also against the factions within in China who operated under the theory that if they helped the foreign oppressors they would be safe and rich.

We're not talking about Mao just up and killing people for laughs. We're talking about Mao ending the hierarchal dominance imposed on the Chinese people by foreign invaders.

As for the means/ends position of anarchism, I have respect for the intuition behind it but find it completely bankrupt in reality. In China, the Europeans were selling opium to Chinese people - means of totally free exchange without dominance. Except the result was addiction, death, and social destruction. The Chinese government decided to ban opium sales and seized the opium that was on their national territory - a completely hierarchical means of dominance. The English decided that they would "defend the freedom of commerce and exchange" and "resisted" the Chinese government by bombarding them with their (at the time) totally unstoppable navy.

Anarchist means/ends is, in the end, indistinguishable from liberalism, which is why anarchism contains both AnComs and AnCaps. Choosing to put ideals over people's lives is not something I can respect.

You are comparing late-stage capitalist Nations to ones that are just starting.

The Bolshevik revolution occurred before the Western "green revolution" in agriculture, and they started from serfdom, and still the Soviets were able to achieve poverty alleviation in 30 years that took liberal democracies almost 150 years achieve. And the outcomes after that were still incredible, with rents costing less than 10% of income and homelessness eradicated, things the West has never achieved.

China started in 1949 having been subjugated by multiple European powers and Japan for over a century, with the Western drug dealers getting over a third of Chinese people hooked on opium. They were literally the poorest country on the planet in 1949 and again, within 50 years had achieved more poverty alleviation than the entire Western world combined had achieved in 200. And they did it without taking over an entire continent and committing a genocide that killed 90% of the original inhabitants.

How has allowing for Millionaires and billionaires maximized the benefit to the masses?

The same way capitalism in the West benefited from allowing millionaires and billionaires - efficient allocation of resources in a complex economy. That's what capitalism is good at. No one argues against that. Even Marx acknowledged why capitalism emerged and the effectiveness of the system.

The difference is that under a liberal ideology of "fuck you, I got mine" we developed robber barons while labor unions were beaten to death by private and state police and coal miners were bombed from airplanes, whereas under a communist party the profit accrued to the millionaires and billionaires went hand-in-hand with massive poverty alleviation. I mean, it's quite explicit, well documented, analyzed, and all of Communist theory from the beginning can make sense of it. That you think the existence of private wealth pockets must inherently mean that the people get no benefit is you projecting the history of liberalism onto systems that aren't as depraved as liberalism.

The rhetoric is good but China's Praxis is going to fail just like everyone else who's tried it.

So you admit that it hasn't failed yet, and that far from being purely rhetoric, it's actually worked.

It's already slowing and calcifying.

Economic growth is not an independent nation-state thing. It's a global economy thing. And China's growth is 2x - 4x higher than the most powerful economies in the West. You're basically saying that just because it's winter, the falling temperatures disprove global warming. China's growth is still second in the world, with India's growth leading.

Just like in the west. It's not magic.

The only magic here is just how effective Western propaganda is at making you disbelieve all th evidence in front of you. It's not magic that communism outperforms capitalism. It's not magic that communism focuses on the quality of the life of the masses. It's not magic that liberalism has failed. Liberalism believes in magic like "if we enshrine moral values into our government, we will thrive and prosper". Anarchism believes in magic like "hierarchies are evil and produce abject poverty and eliminating hierarchies is both possible and will result in thriving and prosperity"