chapotraphouse

Full disclosure I'm half educating half trolling:

The Democratic People's Republic of Korea has a better constitution than the US. Instead of a president appointing all of the heads of executive departments people get to vote for them.

Harvard University’s Ash Center released a 2020 study of Chinese public opinion showing that, as of 2016, “95.5 percent of respondents were either ‘relatively satisfied’ or ‘highly satisfied’ with Beijing,”

[...]

Li: At the moment, the Chinese the party state has proven an extraordinary ability to change. I mean, I make the joke: “in America you can change the political party, but you can’t change the policies. In China you cannot change the party, but you can change policies.” So, in the past 66 years, China has been run by one single party. Yet the political changes that have taken place in China in these past 66 years have been wider, and broader, and greater than probably any other major country in modern memory.

Pilger: So in that time China ceased to be communist. Is that what you’re saying?

Li: Well, China is a market economy, and it’s a vibrant market economy. But it is not a capitalist country. Here’s why: there’s no way a group of billionaires could control the Politburo as billionaires control American policy-making. So in China you have a vibrant market economy, but capital does not rise above political authority. Capital does not have enshrined rights. In America, capital — the interests of capital and capital itself — has risen above the American nation. The political authority cannot check the power of capital. That’s why America is a capitalist country, and China is not.

from https://redsails.org/china-has-billionaires/

also hey look, you're in this picture:

Marxists view "success" as improving people's lives, i.e. increasing the amount of wealth each individual has, getting people out poverty, improving life expectancy, improving literacy, improving home ownership rates, improving access to health care, so on and so forth.

Liberals view "success" as bringing people "freedumb and democrazy", even if that entails completely destroying their living standards, killing tons of people, driving people into immense poverty, preventing their country from developing.

But it makes no sense because if "democracy" comes from the Greek, "demos kratia," meaning, "people's power." If the people actually had the power, why would they not use the political institutions to improve their livelihoods? So how do liberals reconcile this contradiction that you can have "democracy" while at the same time not having expected outcomes from democracy?

They resolve this contradiction by reducing "democracy" down to mere rituals. If you perform the rituals, you're a "democracy." If you don't, you're a ”dictatorship." The actual outcomes of the rituals don't matter, if people's lives aren't improving, if they're even getting worse, it's all justified as long as people are performing the correct rituals.

This makes liberal understanding of "democracy" better understood as a state religion rather than any actual real desire to give power to the people. They, in fact, always, consistently, praise the destruction of living standards as long as those rituals get to be performed. Libya is a great example of this, but so is all of eastern Europe, so is the million who died of COVID in the US while they call China "authoritarian" for protecting its people.

So if you look at global poverty over the last (say) 40 years or so, there's been a downward trend. Take China out, no downward trend. The World Bank likes to crow about how their policies have lead to the lowest levels of poverty in history, but if you look at places like sub Saharan Africa and Latin America where the World Bank and the IMF have been most active, poverty has been stagnant at best and actively increasing at worst - something the UN has remarked upon repeatedly.

So what gives? If China is just like any other capitalistic country, why is poverty going down there so much faster than anywhere else? Is the fact that China has been so apparently successful at reducing poverty and food insecurity an endorsement of authoritarianism?

Apart from what everyone else has posted I'd just like to add that China is the only country (with means) that takes climate change seriously