• SovereignState@lemmygrad.ml
    ·
    1 year ago

    Really funny that they use the 800 million number given that in 1953, 4 years after the PRC's founding, China's population was around 582 million, yet in the past 40 years (notably after Mao's death) the CPC's governance has lifted 800 million people out of poverty.

    Where did they get the 800 million number from? Did they get it mixed up?

    • GarbageShoot [he/him]
      ·
      11 months ago

      It's a little bit of a deceptive figure since it doesn't have a good way of accounting for what people had under Mao, and poverty skyrocketed with Deng before it got better.

      • SovereignState@lemmygrad.ml
        ·
        edit-2
        11 months ago

        I've found it difficult to find sources specifically detailing the poverty rate pre-Deng and post-Deng. Income inequality undoubtedly increased under Deng (par for the course for market reforms, unfortunately), but I don't think that's a relevant measure when considering what "extreme poverty" is (deprivation of basic human necessities like food, water, and shelter - intentional or incidental).

        If you have sources, I'd appreciate it. I can't find anything detailing the poverty rate prior to 1980.

        • GarbageShoot [he/him]
          ·
          11 months ago

          Here's one:

          https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13563467.2023.2217087

          • SovereignState@lemmygrad.ml
            ·
            edit-2
            11 months ago

            Thanks!!

            I don't doubt it and I believe ya, I just wanted more info. I'm not a fan of market reforms in the ideal, but I can, to an extent, understand their historical necessity for China & Vietnam.

            addendum:

            These estimates indicate that from 1981 to 1990, when most of China’s socialist provisioning systems were still in place, the country’s extreme poverty rate was on average only 5.6 per cent.

            Moreover, extreme poverty in China increased during the capitalist reforms of the 1990s, reaching a peak of 68 per cent, as privatisation inflated the prices of essential goods and thus deflated the incomes of the working classes.

            Can't really fault people for thinking the PRC really did take the "capitalist road", holy shit. If it weren't for their major successes as of recent, I'd still think the same.

            • GarbageShoot [he/him]
              ·
              11 months ago

              Vietnam's situation is further complicated by IMF involvement. What you highlighted is why I generally think that the "economic miracle" aside from being crass liberal myth-making, solved a problem that it itself created because the privatization reforms multiplied poverty roughly 15 times before bringing it back down over the course of a few decades, but many people never saw the other side of that change because they died in squalor.

              I don't mean that to go Maoist, I think that something at least similar to what Deng did was probably necessary to prevent China being destroyed by capitalist encirclement, but there is the danger in the long term that it saved the revolution from murder only by having it commit suicide.