It was always from the very start meant to maximized the freedom of the Landed classes, nobody else.

gotta ensure that reserve army of labor, otherwise how the capitalists gonna keep profit?

Here is your Lemmy ban medal;

Wdym? Haven't you seen the citizens of the democratic people's republic of Korea cheer and cry when they see their beloved leader Kim Jong Un?

Also, did you know that countless people defect from South Korea to the democratic people's republic of Korea???

/s

The second point is legitimately what someone told me on lemmygrad. No, they explicitly said "today". They were not just talking about the 50s-60s.

I wonder how many of them think they ally live like a North Korean peasant?

Also, any source that disagrees with you, biased sources like Wikipedia, are just Fake News!

Inheritance should be taxed if you really want equal chances lol but ig you dont want equal chances, one person can inherit millions the other inherits nothing, yeah thats fair /s

You mean people don't like that millions of people starved to death when Mao killed at the intellectuals? Yeah, I could see why people might have a bad view of that.

The people of Taiwan, despite sharing a common cultural and ethnic history as mainland China, enjoy a substantially higher standard of living than their mainland peers.

This is a ridiculous comparison. Taiwan received substantial foreign aid from the US because of it's strategic value against the mainland, while the PRC was subject to a massive economic embargo.

Yes, they’ve raised hundreds of millions out of poverty, but that’s been the case throughout East Asia. The whole region saw its standard of living dramatically rise as it industrialized. And the capitalist countries have enjoyed far greater economic success than the communist ones.

Sorry, which countries are we talking about again? There's not that many countries in East Asia. Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan all benefited from foreign investment and trade, and again, with much smaller populations.

If you're going to argue that the embargo on China was an inevitable result of its communist policies, well, that's a big part of why they did the reforms in the 80's.

The absolute number of people is a red herring. Obviously big countries have more people.

That... what? I don't follow what you're saying here at all.

It's much easier for a small country to modernize in a short period of time, especially with outside help. It's very difficult to reach all the people in all the rural areas of China, it means more infrastructure has to be built, more people have to be educated, etc.

I’m hoping you’re not one of those .ml folks that acts like a Republican and calls every source they don’t like “Fake News.” But in case you are, can you provide your own sources?

My source is the extremely biased communist newsletter known as The World Bank. Hopefully that's not too far-left for you.

I would be curious on your thoughts of the per-capita incomes of China vs the capitalist East Asian countries. Can you show that China has performed better than them on a per-capita basis?

I don't agree that per-capita is the relevant statistic for the above reasons.

I'm also not entirely sure why we're comparing China to capitalist countries in the first place.

Norway? Massive oil reserves and natural resources in a country with a small population. Imagine Quatar with a more sane government and much more sane (and richer) neighbours. Plus self-sufficiency in terms of agriculture.

Switzerland? It was the one neutral country where everyone parked their emergency money. They played all sides in ww2 and won. Everyone needs a neutral ground to negotiate and put their fuck-off money.

Both very exceptional cases.

Like, why aren’t they more like Iceland, Finland, Switzerland or Norway?

Honestly, these are the only countries I do like in the world, specially Switzerland and Norway.

That's probably because you're only looking at the surface level and not understanding the history of why countries and cultures make the decisions they do. Because all around the world, you can find countless examples of people trying to enact moderate social democratic policies, and being labelled as communists anyway and getting exterminated by far-right militias funded by the US. You generally don't hear about them because they're long dead, but the people of those countries remember their examples.

European countries generally haven't had to worry about that as much, being essentially vassals of the US instead of colonies, they are granted much longer leashes. But those countries outside of the West who recognize this and take necessary measures to survive are generally denounced as "authoritarian," justifying more open acts of aggression against them. The harsh truth is that when you look at examples of existing socialism and wonder why they're not more open, it's survivorship bias.

Take the example of Mohammad Mossadegh, a peaceful, progressive, democratically elected prime minister of Iran. After generations of struggling to convince the British to negotiate and abide by agreements regarding the oil they were stealing, Mossadegh nationalized the oil industry, in order that the profits from it would help lift ordinary Iranians, who were some of the poorest people in the world. He was faced with a devastating embargo, and was ousted in a coup led by the CIA.

What makes Mossadegh a particularly poignant example is that he did everything "the right way." When all then newspapers in the country were taken over by the CIA and started printing constant criticism of him, he respected the freedom of the press and did nothing about it. When the CIA hired protesters to march in the streets, he respected the freedom of assembly. He never shut down the US embassy which the CIA was operating out of, and in fact, when a diplomat called him, days before the coup, feeding a false story about the embassy getting death threats from his supporters, he put out a public radio message urging his supporters to stand down and stay off the streets. When the coup happened shortly afterward, there was no one to come to his aid.

Mossadegh was replaced by a literal monarch who used secret police to hunt down and exterminate the Iranian left. When the shah fell, the left was too weak to step into power, and that's how they got the government they have now. Generations of Iranians suffered from political repression and economic exploitation under the shah, only for it to be replaced by the repressive government they have now. It could very well be a hundred years until the Iranians get another chance at a leftist government.

With those stakes, with the ever-present threat from the US, is it actually so commendable to do things the "right" way, like Mossadegh did? To fall on your sword, knowing that you didn't commit the sin of authoritarianism, but that millions of people will suffer generations of oppression because you failed to protect your country from the colonizers?

When you understand that this is the reality of every country outside of the imperial core, you start to have more sympathy for those countries and projects that have actually succeeded and survived, even if they have done so through ideologically impure means.

I really hate this untestable argument as if we could go back in time and do A|B test to see which framework would have lifted people out of poverty the fastest.

What?? Then why even discuss anything about anything?

If you're criticizing China's policies, surely the point of that criticism is that you think different policies would have been more effective.

It's also not entirely an untestable counterfactual because we can examine every other political faction that had a reasonable chance of controlling China, and see what their leadership looked like in practice, and make reasonable extrapolations based on that.

• The Nationalists did absolutely nothing to help the rural poor, embezzled foreign aid, and were more preoccupied with hunting down their domestic enemies than repelling the genocidal fascist invaders. Chiang Kai-Shek literally had to be captured by his own bodyguards to be pressured into defending the country. Life expectancy remained completely flat during his rule.

• The fascist, genocidal Japanese invaders weren't a good option for obvious reasons.

• How about having no centralized authority at all? That's what they had during the warlord period, a time of chaos and conflict that left the country vulnerable and did nothing to improve things for anyone.

• Before that, there was the Qing dynasty, an authoritarian monarchy which was so assured of its superiority that they completely failed to adapt to foreign innovations and technologies, out of pride, even when it was clear that those technologies were superior.

• Then you have the various European powers, carving the country up to divy up the resources between each other, while getting half the country addicted to opium.

• And, returning to how things played out historically, we have the one and only faction that had any intention whatsoever of helping the hundreds of millions of starving farmers, which doubled life expectancy within a generation and then adapted to changing conditions and enacted policies which, again, brought 800 million people out of extreme poverty. And the whole reason they won the revolution was because the starving Chinese peasants could tell that they were the only ones who gave two shits about helping them.

Which dicks do we measure and do we start at the balls or just the shaft?

I'm the one trying to avoid this pointless dick-measuring contest between countries with vastly different conditions, despite everyone else trying to draw me into it. I've said repeatedly that I don't know why we're comparing countries. Why don't you ask WoodScientist whose dicks we measure, since he's the one trying to measure dicks?

100% they have a class based system it's just not talked about.

It's literally on their flag though. Those stars aren't just decoration, they stand for the peasants, workers, petite bourgeois and national bourgeois, unified and led by the big star: the communist party, and its allies.

China is a people's republic, which historically would mean that those various class strata would be represented in government, by various parties and mass organizations. Not just a single communist party (see, East Germany, Socialist Poland, or the early DPRK). As China has developed its productive forces, however, a decision was made to allow the Bourgeoisie to be an element within the communist party itself, so they couldn't form their own separate base of political power. While that brings contradictions, they're far more manageable than they would be otherwise.

They're pretty open about all of this.

Yes, that’s why it’s not communist. But it is socialist, because the working class controls the government and holds the reins of the economy.

an actual self-serving but smart understanding of capitalism

Welcome to marxism-leninism. Socialist state building is about achieving progress for the people. That can mean building up production forces and engaging in capitalism, as long as the capitalist class is subject to the peoples wishes.