4 ms·

China developed more slowly than its neighbors, unsurprising given the communist party’s crushing of free communication and enterprise and the killing of tens o

• wayoutthere 5y ago
  Huh? China literally slowed its pace of development intentionally so they didn’t kill millions more. They learned that the Great Leap Forward was too fast so they slowed it down and made it a multi-decade project. Interior China was largely subsistence farming 50 years ago and now boasts some of the largest cities in the world. They have industrialized incredibly quickly given the scale of the challenge. You can’t bootstrap enough industry to modernize 1.6 billion people overnight; it takes decades to build. They haven’t gone faster because a country like Singapore can buy enough industrial output from Japan or the US to bootstrap their industry. Nobody has enough spare capacity to build at the scale of China, so the Chinese had to cultivate industry over a period of decades. Given that most of the worlds manufacturing is done there now, I’d say they’ve been quite successful.
• jessaustin 5y ago
  "Neighbors"? Singapore is 2000km from the closest part of China! I'm not "playing" dumb; in this entire thread you have given us no reason to expect Singapore and China to have similar modernization performance. Less charitable people than myself might suspect that your personal reason is one you can't mention in polite company.
  • logicchains 5y ago
    >"Neighbors"? Singapore is 2000km from the closest part of China! I'm not "playing" dumb; in this entire thread you have given us no reason to expect Singapore and China to have similar modernization performance. Sorry, what does relevance geographic proximity have to economic growth? The point is that those countries all have similar cultural and racial backgrounds to China, yet developed much faster.
    • jessaustin 5y ago
      Obviously, relative proximity has very little to do with economic growth. No one ITT ever mentioned any other unifying factor, so I was being charitable by suggesting it. You seem less sophisticated than 'woah, in that you've openly stated the racial assumption that 'woah left unsaid.
      • woah 5y ago
        Are you seriously calling people racist for comparing China with the islands and peninsulas surrounding it? Is it racist to compare Germany with England?
        • jessaustin 5y ago
          If you invoked race as an explanation for e.g. why South Korea and Taiwan had similar modernization experiences, that would be weird but maybe not obviously wrong. Among the dozens of other similarities between these two nations, race as perceived by white Americans is one similarity. It's not the most salient similarity to reasonable people, but there's no inherent contradiction involved. That's not what's going on ITT. China has had a different modernization experience from the other nations discussed above, which is entirely understandable given their very different histories, assets, infrastructures, populations, demographics, educations, etc. Your racism is that you ignore all those obvious differences in favor of one trivial, contingent aspect in which to an ineducable white American they might seem similar.
          • woah 5y ago
            In an effort to silence legitimate criticism of a totalitarian regime, you are making the assertion that comparing a country to its neighbors is racist. Amazing.
            • jessaustin 5y ago
              Dude this thread is buried under several flagged posts. No one is reading this. No one will care about racism here. The things we're saying won't silence anyone. However, you could still learn something. When you compare two different groups of people, be sure to have something besides "they have the same skin color" to say when someone asks the obvious follow-up question.