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China and India had similar levels of poverty 50 years ago. How come China today is so different from India today? In terms of cleanliness and poverty eliminat

China and India had similar levels of poverty 50 years ago. How come China today is so different from India today? In terms of cleanliness and poverty elimination specifically. I know China liberalized in the 80’s and India in the 90’s. So you could say that’s a 10 year difference. But China 10 years ago was still very different from India even today. Does anyone have any ideas?

clarionbell 2y ago
It is much harder to report on problems in China than in India for one.
- lupusreal 2y ago
  There's no shortage of industrial and traffic accident videos coming out of China, very often showcasing horrendous working conditions and absolutely depraved levels of apathy from onlookers, which is to say that China isn't very good at suppressing videos that make them look bad. But in all of these videos, China looks 1000x more clean than India. Am I to believe that the Chinese government cares more about suppressing videos that show litter on the streets than a video of a woman slowly running over a child, putting her car in reverse and running over them again, all while people walk by and pretend they don't see it happen?
  - thatloststudent 2y ago
    Is it that hard to find? This[1] took me one search on YouTube. I agree that India is filthy, but it's not hard to find such videos for China either. [1] - https://www.youtube.com/shorts/hEJKOD1ux14 https://www.youtube.com/shorts/hEJKOD1ux14
    - ethan_smith 2y ago
      Do these look the same level of filthy to you? This is the capital city New Delhi (Yamuna River, which is worshipped): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=83t0hdJG8AI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=83t0hdJG8AI
  - insane_dreamer 2y ago
    > China isn't very good at suppressing videos that make them look bad they are extremely good at suppressing such videos internally they will sometimes allow something like the particular video you mention (I was living in China when that video went viral, this was about 10 years ago) because it directs anger at individuals' bad behavior, not at the government (in fact, in favors the government making and enforcing rules to disallow bad citizen behavior)
  - gosub100 2y ago
    The lack of help from bystanders is/was due to some strange liability doctrine that assisting can/could make you liable for damages. This is fairly old information though so hopefully it has changed. Industrial accidents happen in the US too, although I don't know what rate vs China. I think the fact that their factories have surveillance at all shows they are taking action to improve safety. You've got to consider, the population is 1.4bn, so there is going to be more freak accidents caught on camera.
dartharva 2y ago
Industrialization, obviously. China made more money, and faster. All such questions are easily answered once you take a look at the per-capita budget each country has for the required expenditures.
- energy123 2y ago
  Why didn't India industrialize like China did?
  - kentrado 2y ago
    China has central planning.
    - gruez 2y ago
      But it only got richer as it liberalized?
      - kentrado 2y ago
        Reality is often complicated and ideology fails to fit everything in a neat little box. So, it could be that central planning is good for some use cases and bad for others. Likewise, with liberalised economies. There may even be some overlap between the two.
    - em500 2y ago
      But I thought central planning was bad for economic development. Or was that authoritarianism?
      - insane_dreamer 2y ago
        Central planning is very good for pulling a country out of an a poorly developed state into a highly developed state. The USSR experience this under Stalin (setting aside that he was a mass murderer) which created an industrial power. Even in the US, during WW2 the industry was centrally planned and that pulled the US out of the Great Depression. However, central planning as proven to be bad once you reach a developed state. Lots of reasons for this which would be too long to get into here, but has a lot to do with people willing to follow a sacrifice when there is a crisis or the country is working together to get itself out of a bad situation.
kamaal 2y ago
>>I know China liberalized in the 80’s and India in the 90’s. So you could say that’s a 10 year difference. India never really liberalized. It was more like one trick pony with affluence and progress centered around IT industry. You can drive 30 kms from Bangalore in any direction and apart from mobile phones and two wheelers, nothing much has changed since 50+ years.
Cthulhu_ 2y ago
Theory (I live half a world away though): totalitarianism. China has a very strong and top-down government, where if the leadership decides for example that streets should be clean, millions of government officials make it happen. I don't know if that is just good organization or if it's backed by e.g. legal repercussions if it's not done right though. But of course it's got major downsides, as the Chinese government is also pushing hard to remove distinct cultural identities from the various regions of China. India is still much richer in terms of cultures than that, the government can't just come in and start erasing that.
- renewiltord 2y ago
  But that doesn’t explain Taiwan. Even Vietnam is nicer than India.
  - righthand 2y ago
    Taiwan isn’t China.
  - alephnerd 2y ago
    Taiwan was authoritarian until the 1990s-2000s. And Vietnam isn't that much better than India (I travel to both 3-4 times a year because of family). If you're in D1 or D3 of HCMC maybe, but that's not where the majority of Saigon residents live - they mostly live in D10, D8, or D4 which don't look much different from similar neighborhoods in most of Urban India. And once you go to rural Vietnam, I've noticed the quality of life is worse than those in the villages my extended family lives in back in India, because most spending is basically given to a handful of cities. My wife's ancestral village in VN has dirt roads, a single primary school, and no doctor, and social services such as direct welfare transfers are nonexistent. On the other hand, my ancestral village in North India has a wind turbine factory, an electric battery factory, and farmers and residents get around $50-150/mo in direct benefits transfer. A "China" or "South Korea" model doesn't make sense for a democracy like India (or even Indonesia or Phillipines, which share similar issues). A "Turkiye" or "Israel" model makes more sense for these kinds of countries.
  - jp42 2y ago
okucu 2y ago
You can read professor Vivek Chibbers book "locked in place". I highly recommend it (any book of his actually). It's an account of why India's economy was and still is an utter failure. China also didn't succeed due to "liberalization". How come the absolute majority of capitalist economies in the world (Latin/South America, Africa, Asia etc.) are still dirt poor then?
- FirmwareBurner 2y ago
  [flagged]
- ViktorRay 2y ago
  It’s hard to believe today but South Korea in the 1960’s was the poorest nation on Earth. Far poorer than even China. In the post World War II era, Singapore was also deeply impoverished and wrecked by the legacy of war and colonialism. Hong Kong as well. Taiwan was poor too. Japan was decimated by the war. All these countries ended up becoming wealthy and prosperous due to liberalization and capitalism. South Korea, Taiwan, China, Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan. These places are all wealthy today. Of course liberalization and capitalism was not the only factor. I don’t know much about the Latin American economies but I will take your word for them in terms of being poor. And India has many issues too. That’s what I’ve been thinking about recently. It’s interesting to see what people say. Also thank you for the book recommendation.
  - kamaal 2y ago
    >>It’s hard to believe today but South Korea in the 1960’s was the poorest nation on Earth. In % GDP terms S.Korea is a top spender on research, development and education. To give you a contrast in the recent Delhi elections, the party that built quality schooling for the poor was voted out. These are deep undercurrents of the Indian society. Watching a poor persons child get schooling and eventually a shot at getting better than your kid, is something most of the Indian middle class can't bear to watch it happen. The motivations of Indian electorate are always- Can this political party hurt the people I hate? You can't help people whose life purpose is to sabotage good things out of envy that other people will have it good.
alephnerd 2y ago
> China today is so different from India today? In terms of cleanliness Urban Goverment in China versus India is VERY different. In China, cities are given significant autonomy and a bigger pot of cash compared to prefecture they are in. Furthermore, the Chinese cities that most foreigners visit (Beijing, Shanghai) are under direct control of the Central Government. In India, urban government is subservient to state government - with zoning, planning, and budgets coming from the state bureaucracy, especially in cities that HNers tend to visit in India (Bangalore, Gurgaon, Hyderabad). Let's use Bangalore as an example. Bangalore is India's tech hub and the economic engine for Karnataka, but urban Bangalore only has around 20 seats in Karnataka's Legislative Assembly out of 224 total. This means that state governments have little to no incentive to care about providing urban services and goods, when they can better invest in other constituencies that actually can flip the tide in elections. The other aspect is that slums residents can swing elections, so any attempt to demolish a slum can destroy the incumbent party's shot at local elections. Slums/encroached land have significantly monetary value - the first generation who lived in a slum and built the residence often tend to move out and rent out the original building to a new resident while also having the option to mortgage the building to a local lender. If you are an unskilled migrant laborer, you are making around $100-150/mo in Urban India, but if you have a slum residence, if litigation happens for redevelopment, you might end up with around $10-20k and a free apartment (which you can rent out). The same thing happened in China all the time until the mid-2010s, and it's just the general cycle of urbanization. That said, Indian cities are getting better and cleaner, but funding for urban infrastructure only really began in the last 2-3 years. Indian cities today aren't that much different than their Chinese peers in the 2000s, and the exact same kinds of problems (toxic smog in Delhi like in Beijing in the 2000s) but also development are happening (the Delhi redevelopment for G20 similar to Beijing's redevelopment for the 2008 Olympics). Also, one thing I noticed is the 2nd most populous of each state tends to be much cleaner than the 1st. So Mysore is miles cleaner than Bangalore, Coimbatore compared to Chennai, Panchkula to Gurgaon, and Pune to Mumbai, which I assume is because there are fewer outsiders, so the electoral impact is higher, as most migrants (both from the same state or outside) continue to use their home town/village as their primary constituency in order to continue to maintain rural/town landholdings.
- kamaal 2y ago
slothtrop 2y ago
Check this out: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-how-asia-works https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-how-asia-works The odd one out in this assessment is India, because it did some similar things (land reform) without success. A difference might be that India sheltered businesses from foreign competition and didn't encourage and invest as much. Another, is that you need caste connections to do business. Culturally I intuit that the upper-castes that controlled government were less interested in rapid nationwide progress, unlike the ideologues that led South Korea and China. They lived comfortable lives and hung their hats on that.
- alephnerd 2y ago
  India has similar barriers for foreign manufacturing businesses to enter as those that China has. And the caste aspect doesn't make sense, as caste is hyperlocal and there isn't solidarity between caste groups of different ethnicities. Furthermore, caste ranking doesn't fully translate to business ownership, as traditionally, merchant and moneylending castes like Banias were towards the lower end. The main difference between China and India is China makes it's urban centers de facto independent of rural hinterlands within the same prefecture, while in India, urban and rural are both under the same state government.
  - kelipso 2y ago
    I think the caste aspect makes sense in terms of who a politician feels responsible for when they are in power. For example, typical upper caste politician might feel that they only need to improve the conditions of upper caste people while not feeling responsible for people in lower castes, or just people who are poor in general. I think sentiments like that is prevalent across politics in India, though I agree about there being no solidarity between caste groups of different ethnicities. A prime example is the state of government schools in India, which are almost exclusively used by the very poor. State funded schools in east Asian countries are of significantly higher quality.
    - alephnerd 2y ago
      Most politicans in India are from the lowest castes - "Other Backward Caste" and "Scheduled Castes" [0]. And India uses Caste Based Affirmative Action using a quota that makes around 60% of all government positions reserved for lower caste individuals [1] > state of government schools in India, which are almost exclusively used by the very poor. State funded schools in east Asian countries are of significantly higher quality These are broad terms. Education falls onto state and local government in India, and leads to massive variation (eg. Kerala, Punjab public schools doing fairly well versus Bihar, MP public schools doing badly). It's the same in East Asia, though I would like to know what you define as "East Asia". The urban-rural education gap is well documented in China as well [2] [0] - https://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/how-caste-factor-plays-out-in-bjp-congress-lists-101713928660908-amp.html https://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/how-caste-factor-p... [1] - https://www.clearias.com/reservation-in-india/ https://www.clearias.com/reservation-in-india/ [2] - https://fsi.stanford.edu/docs/research_projects__understanding_the_education_gap_in_rural_china https://fsi.stanford.edu/docs/research_projects__understandi...
Yeul 2y ago
Civic pride? It seems to me that Chinese really are motivated to see their country do better.
insane_dreamer 2y ago
China very specifically and deliberately set out to build up its export capability in a way that was highly centralized and consolidated (specifically around the Yangtze Delta), whereby entire supply chains were located next to each, lowering the cost of production and making it difficult for other countries to compete even if they had lower wages. This was not by accident. The other advantage China has was continuity of government economic policies because you had pretty much the same people in charge for a couple of decades which gave time for the policies to take root. Of course China is a totalitarian police state, and not a place I'd want to be (I did live there for some years). But people put up with that because of the hyper economic growth in the 80s-00s; it's hard to think about freedoms and human rights if you can't even feed your family. Once people reach a state where they have their basic needs met then they begin to value other things (like individual freedoms).
rawgabbit 2y ago
https://www.asianstudies.org/publications/eaa/archives/crossing-the-river-by-feeling-the-stones-deng-xiaoping-in-the-making-of-modern-china/ https://www.asianstudies.org/publications/eaa/archives/cross... With regards to China, the article I posted gives a concise history of the modernization of the Chinese economy. Essentially, they a) chose to model their economy after South Korea and Japan as an export-economy. b) normalized political relations with the US and the West and developed intensive trade. c) invested heavily in manufacturing & technical skills that were lost. Despite the pragmatism in economics and trade, China is firmly authoritarian and under the control of the CCCP.
jyscao 2y ago
China has more and better human capital than India.
dontlaugh 2y ago
One had a socialist revolution and the other didn’t. The only difference is that the working class rules China, while the capitalist class rules India.

clarionbell 2y ago

It is much harder to report on problems in China than in India for one.

lupusreal 2y ago
There's no shortage of industrial and traffic accident videos coming out of China, very often showcasing horrendous working conditions and absolutely depraved levels of apathy from onlookers, which is to say that China isn't very good at suppressing videos that make them look bad. But in all of these videos, China looks 1000x more clean than India. Am I to believe that the Chinese government cares more about suppressing videos that show litter on the streets than a video of a woman slowly running over a child, putting her car in reverse and running over them again, all while people walk by and pretend they don't see it happen?
- thatloststudent 2y ago
  Is it that hard to find? This[1] took me one search on YouTube. I agree that India is filthy, but it's not hard to find such videos for China either. [1] - https://www.youtube.com/shorts/hEJKOD1ux14 https://www.youtube.com/shorts/hEJKOD1ux14
  - ethan_smith 2y ago
    Do these look the same level of filthy to you? This is the capital city New Delhi (Yamuna River, which is worshipped): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=83t0hdJG8AI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=83t0hdJG8AI
- insane_dreamer 2y ago
  > China isn't very good at suppressing videos that make them look bad they are extremely good at suppressing such videos internally they will sometimes allow something like the particular video you mention (I was living in China when that video went viral, this was about 10 years ago) because it directs anger at individuals' bad behavior, not at the government (in fact, in favors the government making and enforcing rules to disallow bad citizen behavior)
- gosub100 2y ago
  The lack of help from bystanders is/was due to some strange liability doctrine that assisting can/could make you liable for damages. This is fairly old information though so hopefully it has changed. Industrial accidents happen in the US too, although I don't know what rate vs China. I think the fact that their factories have surveillance at all shows they are taking action to improve safety. You've got to consider, the population is 1.4bn, so there is going to be more freak accidents caught on camera.

dartharva 2y ago

Industrialization, obviously. China made more money, and faster. All such questions are easily answered once you take a look at the per-capita budget each country has for the required expenditures.

energy123 2y ago
Why didn't India industrialize like China did?
- kentrado 2y ago
  China has central planning.
  - gruez 2y ago
    But it only got richer as it liberalized?
    - kentrado 2y ago
      Reality is often complicated and ideology fails to fit everything in a neat little box. So, it could be that central planning is good for some use cases and bad for others. Likewise, with liberalised economies. There may even be some overlap between the two.
  - em500 2y ago
    But I thought central planning was bad for economic development. Or was that authoritarianism?
    - insane_dreamer 2y ago
      Central planning is very good for pulling a country out of an a poorly developed state into a highly developed state. The USSR experience this under Stalin (setting aside that he was a mass murderer) which created an industrial power. Even in the US, during WW2 the industry was centrally planned and that pulled the US out of the Great Depression. However, central planning as proven to be bad once you reach a developed state. Lots of reasons for this which would be too long to get into here, but has a lot to do with people willing to follow a sacrifice when there is a crisis or the country is working together to get itself out of a bad situation.

kamaal 2y ago

>>I know China liberalized in the 80’s and India in the 90’s. So you could say that’s a 10 year difference. India never really liberalized. It was more like one trick pony with affluence and progress centered around IT industry. You can drive 30 kms from Bangalore in any direction and apart from mobile phones and two wheelers, nothing much has changed since 50+ years.

Cthulhu_ 2y ago

Theory (I live half a world away though): totalitarianism. China has a very strong and top-down government, where if the leadership decides for example that streets should be clean, millions of government officials make it happen. I don't know if that is just good organization or if it's backed by e.g. legal repercussions if it's not done right though. But of course it's got major downsides, as the Chinese government is also pushing hard to remove distinct cultural identities from the various regions of China. India is still much richer in terms of cultures than that, the government can't just come in and start erasing that.

renewiltord 2y ago
But that doesn’t explain Taiwan. Even Vietnam is nicer than India.
- righthand 2y ago
  Taiwan isn’t China.
- alephnerd 2y ago
  Taiwan was authoritarian until the 1990s-2000s. And Vietnam isn't that much better than India (I travel to both 3-4 times a year because of family). If you're in D1 or D3 of HCMC maybe, but that's not where the majority of Saigon residents live - they mostly live in D10, D8, or D4 which don't look much different from similar neighborhoods in most of Urban India. And once you go to rural Vietnam, I've noticed the quality of life is worse than those in the villages my extended family lives in back in India, because most spending is basically given to a handful of cities. My wife's ancestral village in VN has dirt roads, a single primary school, and no doctor, and social services such as direct welfare transfers are nonexistent. On the other hand, my ancestral village in North India has a wind turbine factory, an electric battery factory, and farmers and residents get around $50-150/mo in direct benefits transfer. A "China" or "South Korea" model doesn't make sense for a democracy like India (or even Indonesia or Phillipines, which share similar issues). A "Turkiye" or "Israel" model makes more sense for these kinds of countries.
- jp42 2y ago

okucu 2y ago

You can read professor Vivek Chibbers book "locked in place". I highly recommend it (any book of his actually). It's an account of why India's economy was and still is an utter failure. China also didn't succeed due to "liberalization". How come the absolute majority of capitalist economies in the world (Latin/South America, Africa, Asia etc.) are still dirt poor then?

FirmwareBurner 2y ago
[flagged]
ViktorRay 2y ago
It’s hard to believe today but South Korea in the 1960’s was the poorest nation on Earth. Far poorer than even China. In the post World War II era, Singapore was also deeply impoverished and wrecked by the legacy of war and colonialism. Hong Kong as well. Taiwan was poor too. Japan was decimated by the war. All these countries ended up becoming wealthy and prosperous due to liberalization and capitalism. South Korea, Taiwan, China, Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan. These places are all wealthy today. Of course liberalization and capitalism was not the only factor. I don’t know much about the Latin American economies but I will take your word for them in terms of being poor. And India has many issues too. That’s what I’ve been thinking about recently. It’s interesting to see what people say. Also thank you for the book recommendation.
- kamaal 2y ago
  >>It’s hard to believe today but South Korea in the 1960’s was the poorest nation on Earth. In % GDP terms S.Korea is a top spender on research, development and education. To give you a contrast in the recent Delhi elections, the party that built quality schooling for the poor was voted out. These are deep undercurrents of the Indian society. Watching a poor persons child get schooling and eventually a shot at getting better than your kid, is something most of the Indian middle class can't bear to watch it happen. The motivations of Indian electorate are always- Can this political party hurt the people I hate? You can't help people whose life purpose is to sabotage good things out of envy that other people will have it good.

alephnerd 2y ago

> China today is so different from India today? In terms of cleanliness Urban Goverment in China versus India is VERY different. In China, cities are given significant autonomy and a bigger pot of cash compared to prefecture they are in. Furthermore, the Chinese cities that most foreigners visit (Beijing, Shanghai) are under direct control of the Central Government. In India, urban government is subservient to state government - with zoning, planning, and budgets coming from the state bureaucracy, especially in cities that HNers tend to visit in India (Bangalore, Gurgaon, Hyderabad). Let's use Bangalore as an example. Bangalore is India's tech hub and the economic engine for Karnataka, but urban Bangalore only has around 20 seats in Karnataka's Legislative Assembly out of 224 total. This means that state governments have little to no incentive to care about providing urban services and goods, when they can better invest in other constituencies that actually can flip the tide in elections. The other aspect is that slums residents can swing elections, so any attempt to demolish a slum can destroy the incumbent party's shot at local elections. Slums/encroached land have significantly monetary value - the first generation who lived in a slum and built the residence often tend to move out and rent out the original building to a new resident while also having the option to mortgage the building to a local lender. If you are an unskilled migrant laborer, you are making around $100-150/mo in Urban India, but if you have a slum residence, if litigation happens for redevelopment, you might end up with around $10-20k and a free apartment (which you can rent out). The same thing happened in China all the time until the mid-2010s, and it's just the general cycle of urbanization. That said, Indian cities are getting better and cleaner, but funding for urban infrastructure only really began in the last 2-3 years. Indian cities today aren't that much different than their Chinese peers in the 2000s, and the exact same kinds of problems (toxic smog in Delhi like in Beijing in the 2000s) but also development are happening (the Delhi redevelopment for G20 similar to Beijing's redevelopment for the 2008 Olympics). Also, one thing I noticed is the 2nd most populous of each state tends to be much cleaner than the 1st. So Mysore is miles cleaner than Bangalore, Coimbatore compared to Chennai, Panchkula to Gurgaon, and Pune to Mumbai, which I assume is because there are fewer outsiders, so the electoral impact is higher, as most migrants (both from the same state or outside) continue to use their home town/village as their primary constituency in order to continue to maintain rural/town landholdings.

kamaal 2y ago

slothtrop 2y ago

Check this out: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-how-asia-works https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-how-asia-works The odd one out in this assessment is India, because it did some similar things (land reform) without success. A difference might be that India sheltered businesses from foreign competition and didn't encourage and invest as much. Another, is that you need caste connections to do business. Culturally I intuit that the upper-castes that controlled government were less interested in rapid nationwide progress, unlike the ideologues that led South Korea and China. They lived comfortable lives and hung their hats on that.

alephnerd 2y ago
India has similar barriers for foreign manufacturing businesses to enter as those that China has. And the caste aspect doesn't make sense, as caste is hyperlocal and there isn't solidarity between caste groups of different ethnicities. Furthermore, caste ranking doesn't fully translate to business ownership, as traditionally, merchant and moneylending castes like Banias were towards the lower end. The main difference between China and India is China makes it's urban centers de facto independent of rural hinterlands within the same prefecture, while in India, urban and rural are both under the same state government.
- kelipso 2y ago
  I think the caste aspect makes sense in terms of who a politician feels responsible for when they are in power. For example, typical upper caste politician might feel that they only need to improve the conditions of upper caste people while not feeling responsible for people in lower castes, or just people who are poor in general. I think sentiments like that is prevalent across politics in India, though I agree about there being no solidarity between caste groups of different ethnicities. A prime example is the state of government schools in India, which are almost exclusively used by the very poor. State funded schools in east Asian countries are of significantly higher quality.
  - alephnerd 2y ago
    Most politicans in India are from the lowest castes - "Other Backward Caste" and "Scheduled Castes" [0]. And India uses Caste Based Affirmative Action using a quota that makes around 60% of all government positions reserved for lower caste individuals [1] > state of government schools in India, which are almost exclusively used by the very poor. State funded schools in east Asian countries are of significantly higher quality These are broad terms. Education falls onto state and local government in India, and leads to massive variation (eg. Kerala, Punjab public schools doing fairly well versus Bihar, MP public schools doing badly). It's the same in East Asia, though I would like to know what you define as "East Asia". The urban-rural education gap is well documented in China as well [2] [0] - https://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/how-caste-factor-plays-out-in-bjp-congress-lists-101713928660908-amp.html https://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/how-caste-factor-p... [1] - https://www.clearias.com/reservation-in-india/ https://www.clearias.com/reservation-in-india/ [2] - https://fsi.stanford.edu/docs/research_projects__understanding_the_education_gap_in_rural_china https://fsi.stanford.edu/docs/research_projects__understandi...

Yeul 2y ago

Civic pride? It seems to me that Chinese really are motivated to see their country do better.

insane_dreamer 2y ago

China very specifically and deliberately set out to build up its export capability in a way that was highly centralized and consolidated (specifically around the Yangtze Delta), whereby entire supply chains were located next to each, lowering the cost of production and making it difficult for other countries to compete even if they had lower wages. This was not by accident. The other advantage China has was continuity of government economic policies because you had pretty much the same people in charge for a couple of decades which gave time for the policies to take root. Of course China is a totalitarian police state, and not a place I'd want to be (I did live there for some years). But people put up with that because of the hyper economic growth in the 80s-00s; it's hard to think about freedoms and human rights if you can't even feed your family. Once people reach a state where they have their basic needs met then they begin to value other things (like individual freedoms).

rawgabbit 2y ago

https://www.asianstudies.org/publications/eaa/archives/crossing-the-river-by-feeling-the-stones-deng-xiaoping-in-the-making-of-modern-china/ https://www.asianstudies.org/publications/eaa/archives/cross... With regards to China, the article I posted gives a concise history of the modernization of the Chinese economy. Essentially, they a) chose to model their economy after South Korea and Japan as an export-economy. b) normalized political relations with the US and the West and developed intensive trade. c) invested heavily in manufacturing & technical skills that were lost. Despite the pragmatism in economics and trade, China is firmly authoritarian and under the control of the CCCP.

jyscao 2y ago

China has more and better human capital than India.

dontlaugh 2y ago

One had a socialist revolution and the other didn’t. The only difference is that the working class rules China, while the capitalist class rules India.