The other person was being sarcastic.

I've made very well reasoned arguments backed by data and sources, you just randomly scream that I'm "moving the goalposts" somehow with absolutely zero explanation for how I'm supposedly doing it and just repeat that and throw insults at me. It's obvious that you're just a troll.

Where do you think the goalposts are supposed to be? What did I say that set the goalposts there? You have nothing, you're just slinging shit against the wall and hoping something sticks.

Boring troll.

long standing contracts

That graph he just posted kinda pokes some holes in this narrative that it's just "long standing contracts" when there's a massive increase in aid during his term.

There's also the reality that you lot tend to ignore/deny which is that Biden bypassed congress to send additional weapons.

And you describe the US as "the biggest weapon manufacturer in the world" as though that somehow makes it better instead of worse. We're already producing ridiculous numbers of bombs, and then we're sending even more bombs to arm a genocide, and that's somehow OK?

It's so ridiculous. All the US is doing is having Israel do it's dirty work so it has plausible deniability that rubes and partisan hacks can hide behind.

Wtf are you even talking about? My first comment was about this, and that's all I've been saying this entire conversation. The goalpost has always been exactly where it's at.

It is entirely you and others who have tried to move the goalposts from "This one policy was successful" to "China is the best country in the world," which was never my position, because it's easier for you to argue against that.

You're completely full of shit. You've just defaulted to random accusations and insults based on nothing because you know you can't argue with the facts.

That's completely absurd. This is the dumbest thing anyone's said this conversation.

The sample size isn't "n=1" it's n=800,000,000. It's clearly visible from the graph that I posted that the reduction in poverty began immediately after the reforms, and then continued extremely consistently on an extremely large scale.

In case you need a refresher on what the data looks like:

You're just so committed to shitting on every single thing that China does that you're willing to throw out all reason and logic, completely ignore obvious facts, and throw out any means of evaluating any policy just to avoid the conclusion that China may have done a single thing right.

What other possible explanation even is there? You're just very objectively wrong.

As we can’t verify this in any meaningful extend due to - as you yourself pointed out - every country and culture being invredibly different. So why are you OK with attributing success to chinese policy but not failure?

I'm so confused by this conversation. Let's recap.

Originally, OP asked why China has billionaires if it's aiming to be socialist. I replied that the reforms that allowed billionaires also resulted in 800 million people escaping extreme poverty. WoodScientist randomly started drawing comparisons between the PRC and Taiwan, and I said that it's apples and oranges, and that I didn't see the relevance to what I had said. Then you started providing even more reasons why the comparison isn't really valid, acting as if that contradicted my position in some way, which was even more confusing. You added that you didn't like looking at other possible routes China could have gone, because it's untestable.

Now, having established that you don't like comparing China to other countries (calling it "dick measuring"), and also that you don't like comparing other historical possibilities (calling them "untestable") you're now accusing me of being unwilling to attribute failure to Chinese policy.

First of all, which failure are you talking about? There are plenty which I'm willing to acknowledge. But also, on what basis could you call any policy a success or failure? You've thrown away all your epistemology. If we discount comparisons to other places, and also discount comparisons to other possibilities, then what can we look at to determine if a given policy was a success or failure?

I see today how unjust and miserable China is despite what tiktok might paint you.

Do you? What's your point of reference for that? Some hypothetical ideal that exists only in your mind?

Citing one of my favorite philosophers, Aristotle, and the one that is my favorite book of ethics, Nicomacus Ethics, virtue is the just (or point) half between two vices, one by excess and one by default.

What defines the standards of what is considered excess? Go back a thousand years, and nearly any modern government would be considered "excessively" democratic. Or, look at the debates over slavery in early America. The idea of immediate abolition of slavery was the most extreme position then, yet it's considered a given today. Looking back at all the compromises made to "keep the peace," it seems like they only served to prolong the institution of slavery, and that conflict was necessary and unavoidable.

If we really want to play with the idea, I wonder if the Golden Mean implies that nonbinary people are better than everyone, because ideally you want to be balanced between masculinity and femininity. It's pretty clear that we cannot apply the Golden Mean uncritically to all possible qualities.

If the objective is to guarantee the best possible conditions for its population, which I do not understand why they do exactly the opposite

They don't. You're painting a one-sided picture that only looks at the negative. They have eradicated extreme poverty, they invest in massive high speed rail projects and develop green energy. The average Chinese person has seen massive improvements in their material conditions in their lifetime.

Much of what you're discussing are political freedoms. It's true that I have more freedom to talk shit about my government than people in China do about theirs. But all I can really do is talk shit. The politicians aren't going to care how much I criticize them, they're bought out by corporate interests, and many of them are in safely gerrymandered districts. At the same time, economic conditions can restrain one's freedom as well. My right to shit-talk my boss doesn't mean much if my boss can fire me on a whim and I need the job to survive. Is being able to whine impotently about politics really worth having to follow whatever rules a landlord sets for you because you can't afford your own home? Meanwhile, home ownership in China is over 90%.

With all that being said, China's system is not my ideal. However, I do believe that China's existence is necessary for more ideal systems to emerge around the world. Without China, the US's status as global hegemon would be completely unchallenged, and it would be all the more free to ruthlessly suppress any remotely left-leaning political projects, anyone on the globe, through sanctions and coups. But, the more ruthless and aggressive they are, the more countries turn to China, because it exists as an alternative. Even if China were as bad as the US, it would still be preferable to have power divided between two superpowers than one.

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?

Which variables are allowed in the math depends on what the point of the comparison is. And as I said, I'm not really sure what the point of comparing these countries is. It's pretty apples to oranges and doesn't really tell us anything about the efficacy of China's reforms in the context of their specific conditions.

The fact that there's such a difference in landmass is just another reason why it doesn't make sense to compare the two. If you want to compare China to another country for some reason, it would probably make sense to compare it to a country with more similar conditions, like India perhaps.

You linked a source repeating your earlier claim about the raw number of people lifted out of poverty. Again, I ask, what about per-capita income?

Yeah, because I didn't make any claims about per-capita income. That's how sources work. I'm not going to provide sources for claims I didn't make, if you're just curious about some random fact, you can look it up yourself.

China received extensive aid from the USSR.

Lol? That's a joke right?

You never heard about a little thing called the Sino-Soviet split? Even before that, the Soviets had plenty of their own problems, they were nowhere near as wealthy as the US and were struggling to survive and rebuild from WWII, and again, that much smaller aid for a much shorter period of time was distributed to a much larger population.

Also worth noting that the USSR initially supported the KMT over the CPC, seeing the CPC as too small and weak to be viable and the KMT as a lesser evil to the Japanese and expecting China to go through a capitalist stage of development.

Also, I thought we were discussing the Dengist reforms, which happened in the 80's? The USSR wasn't even around for much longer, even if they had been aiding them, which they very famously weren't.

Do you understand what “per capita” means?

Yes I know what per capita means.

It would be far more impressive for a country of one million people to lift 950,000 people out of poverty than for a nation of 1 billion people to lift 800 million people out of poverty.

Not really, no.

Why? I see no reason for this.

Because, for one thing, modernization in developing countries is dependent on foreign technologies that have to spread to a much wider area, and that takes time and resources (resources that China lacked, because so many people were on the brink of starvation). If a big rich superpower says, "Hey, I'm gonna plop a semiconductor factory on your little island" it's going to have a pretty significant impact on the average income of said island.

It’s the only meaningful way to compare countries.

I don't really understand why we're comparing countries.

Otherwise you just end up making brain-dead conclusions like, “the big country has the big number. Therefore it’s better.”

That is not remotely close to anything I've said or believe.

I said things about the success of the policy of the reforms and opening up in the 80's, and you're bring up all these other countries that I said nothing about and trying to compare them on absolute terms for some reason. I'm not saying one country is better than another country, I'm just looking at the effects of a particular policy. If you want to argue whether your dad could beat up my dad, you'll have to find someone else to do that with.

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.