This isn't exactly correct, because of the differences between the countries. China and Taiwan are completely different with a different set of populations. T

This isn't exactly correct, because of the differences between the countries. China and Taiwan are completely different with a different set of populations. Taiwan was colonized by Japan, and thus industrialized up until WW2 was over. Then it got an influx of the richer and more educated class from China after the '49 revolution. In addition to that Chiang Kaishek took most if not all of China's gold reserves and placed it in Taiwan, thus taking all of China's wealth that it had and allowing it to service a mere 20M+ population, rather than 500M people left in China who no longer had any reserves to trade with the world. Taiwan is much smaller in geography therefore infrastructure building requires less capital, and population was much higher educated from the get go, so it can't serve as a direct comparison. Japan was already industrialized prior to WW2, and was basically complete in its industrialization by around WW1 if not earlier by a couple decades. S. Korea could serve as a comparison, but there's a big difference in that it got massive influx of foreign investment from the US, with a major reason being that it serve as outpost against Communism spreading. When the geopolitical situation started to change between US and China in the late 60s-early 70s, Mao sensed it and already started to have talks with the US as seen with Nixon + Kissinger, which later became the foundation that allowed the influx of foreign capital into the country. Prior to this, China was basically like NK today, with absolutely no outside support whatsoever, with an economy, infrastructure, etc., which includes even basic stuff like irrigation destroyed from civil war, WW2, etc. It was extremely capital deficient. People act like China prior to '49 was some wonderland, and that once the Communist came in, they destroyed everything and therefore there was mass starvation. Not really. China sucked prior to '49, and reading e.g. some statistics from American sinologists like e.g Jonathan Spence, you know that the basic peasant (which represented the large majority of China's population) daily diet consisted of almost no meat, and simply what they called gruel, every day of the year. A peasant normal diet would simply be e.g. sweet potatoes flour mixed with water everyday with maybe some vegetables.