this post was submitted on 05 Sep 2024
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Before the revolution, China had regular famines. Today they have none and have experienced one of the highest increases in living quality in human history.
The same phenomenon applied to the USSR (before Yeltsin's coup undid all that and caused the largest drop in life expectancy outside of a war).
China famously had some pretty massive famines after the revolution as well. China's real ascendency happened after Mao had been gone for a while and reformers were able to change his worst policies. China still struggles to this day to elevate its massive rural population, with more than half not receiving a high school education.
But more to the point, all industrial nations saw the exact same (and more) living improvements, so it's hard to really attribute it to political violence.
Yes, the revolution didn't fix everything overnight, but it did lay the ground-work that allowed them to fix their problems. Unlike say India, who is a net-exporter of food, yet still has excess deaths associated with malnutrition.
By pretty much every measure China lagged the industrial world for several decades. China beat Japan in WW2, a country which got nuked twice, and didn't pass the much smaller country in economic output until the mid 90s. Pretty much everyone outside China agrees that Mao's policies held them back immensely due to poor economic planning and continuous political strife.
This has got to be bait
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1041395/life-expectancy-russia-all-time/
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1041350/life-expectancy-china-all-time/
Most of the pictures of soviet bread lines and poverty that form the popular image were from the 90s, when the former USSR embraced capitalism and was eviscerated by it. The subjects are too broad for me to recommend just one book, but this one does a good job of explaining the west's economic policy towards Russia and ideology behind it during the 90s that caused that dip.