It's a powerful sentiment. But it needs to withstand the objective test of demonstrating, numerically, its narrative against historical data. When the CPC took

It's a powerful sentiment. But it needs to withstand the objective test of demonstrating, numerically, its narrative against historical data. When the CPC took power, the GDP per capita was 54 USD in 1952 (earliest date in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_GDP_of_China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_GDP_of_China). If you chose your words carefully and still state "forcibly degraded back into stone age out of somewhat moderately industrialised economy", one would expect the GDP per capita to revert to 1 USD. In reality, GDP per capita grew to 89 USD in 1960, at its worst reverted to 71 USD during the height of the famine and recovered 3 years later to 98 USD.