But this is not the debate, the topic is 'can society be improved' not 'can society be made utopian'. Nobody said 'China is not the perfect society'. The questi

But this is not the debate, the topic is 'can society be improved' not 'can society be made utopian'. Nobody said 'China is not the perfect society'. The question is 'has it improved' and by literally every possible metric, literally any metric or measure or estimate of 'cruelties' has improved. That does not mean non exist now. But you are drawing a binary between 'cruelties' existing or not and judging by that if it has improved. That is just a totally unreasonable. By your metric no society has ever actually improved, because almost every improvement in any society ever made some people worse of as well. It just sound out of touch with observed reality even if you can make sense of it with some philosophical mental gymnastics. But I much rather be a delivery driver in contemporary China compared to collectivist farm laborer 60 years ago. Now there is an underclass that is some part of the population before the was a literal slave class that was the overwhelming majority of the population. The different in cruelty and exploitation is not even in the same universe. The amount of starvation, slave conditions, massive famines, the cultural revolution, these are some of the most horrible things that happened in human history. I fear your approach is downplaying some of the largest scale human suffering ever inflicted on a population. I'm all for being critical of China and some of their policies. But if the question is 'has society been improved' the only reasonably answer is 'yes, by a lot'. You can maybe justify this by some philosophical reasoning, fine, but what I interpret this is as is virtue signaling, hence I somewhat rude.