>>62182047>managing an economy top-down is too hardIt is rigorously impossible
China does it. They're crushing the West.The West does it, too. A tiny group commands millions of slaves who deal in the real world.
>>62182139China has a hybrid system, best described as dirigisme. And the state only directs in some sectors of the economy, not in every sector.
>>62182139china is a 3rd world country that people attempt to flee legally and illegally. they even have capital controls.
>>62182139>authoritarian state trumpets its successes and hides its failures>therefore X ideology must be the bestYou are a useful idiot. China is worse off per capita than any of its East Asian peers. They lost 40 years of progress to Maoist idiocy and literally only started moving forward when they finally gave up on a true command economy. Their economy has been stuck in low gear for 2 years now because the govt refuses to either let the housing market properly collapse or bail it out in full. Youth unemployment is so bad they changed how they counted the numbers to make it look better. Yeah they can make stuff cheaper than anywhere else, but their citizens don’t benefit because the hukou system prevents them from moving up the economic ladder or seeking better opportunities. Yeah you could make a 10,000 dollar EV in America too if you could force people to work 9/9/6 for minimum wage.
>>62183818China has capital controls because it allows them to both control their exchange rate and run a flexible monetary policy at the same time
>>62182139Notice how they deny the first but not the second
>>62183848>theyThe second part is true so why would I address it?
>>62183846thats obvious. they exist also to simply prevent capital outflows. the US doesnt have them for example.
>>62183848why even address the 2nd? the west is far wealthier than china. china had laws that limited the number of children people could have even lol.
>>62183835China having poor economic performance during the Mao era was mostly due to the CCP fearing a war with the USSR and/or the USA. China was in a quasi war economy, making the CCP highly repressive, centralizing economic control and wasting massive resources on war preparations.China's famine is popularly blamed on the Four Pests campaign, but it was mostly due to the state taking grain to sell on export so it would have mroe money to fund industrialization. In the 1960s and 1970s, China wasted massive resources on the Third Front, the Great Underground Wall, dozens of underground airbases, Lin Biao fortresses, Project 816, etc.This was, of course, accompanied by massive repression and state control, because that's the only realistic way you can mobilize a large fraction of societal resources for military purposes. It's the same reason the US introduced censorship, the War Productions Board, price controls and rationing of basic goods during WW2.The reason China become more economically and politically liberal from the late 1970s onward was not because of Mao's death, it was because the DF-4 IRBM and DF-5 ICBM became operational, which made the CCP to feel safe from any attack by the USSR or USA.
>>62183856The US benefits more from the current system, in which it exports inflation to the rest of the world, than it would benefit from having both a more stable exchange rate and a more flexible monetary policy.Perhaps the US will impose capital controls in a few decades from now, when the relative economic balance of power in the world has changed. We have already seen how the US goes from championing free trade to raising tariff walls whenever the US is no longer winning under free trade.
>>62183893>Perhaps the US will impose capital controls in a few decades from nowi guess keep us posted on hypothetical things that may happen one day decades from now
>>62183875China did a lot of war production, true. But the US also invested a spectacular amount into war production at the time, not to mention the multiple actual wars it fought 1950-1980. The reason that war production came at a crippling cost to China was because the economic system was incapable of producing the economic surpluses that the American system was.>The reason China become more economically and politically liberal from the late 1970s onward was not because of Mao's deathActually delusional, not even the CCP believes this. Not even the post-Mao CCP believed this: see Deng Xiaopings “70% right” commentary.
>>62183904At the time, China was a subsistence agrarian economy that had recently emerged from devastating war. There was almost no industry or capital stock to speak of. Economic output would have been low at the time regardless of which economic system China adopted. So, the underlying reason why a quasi war economy came at a crippling cost to China was because China's economy was small to begin with.The US economy at the time of WW2 was the world's leading industrial powerhouse, with a huge capital stock. Thus, it was possible for the US to allocate vast resources to the war effort while still keeping quite a lot left for private consumption and investment. Despite this, the US still introduced some degree of central planning, price controls, rationing, etc, but the economic situation was never bad enough to reach the point that some people had to starve (unlike in, say, Nazi Germany or the British empire).Furthermore, the US itself was never at direct risk of attack or invasion, so US war efforts were never been as urgent as they have sometimes been for others.What Deng said about Mao in public was just what was necessary to say in order to justify a rapid change from the policies associated with Mao, which the public had previously been told were the correct policies. The policies were associated with Mao, so then if those policies were to be changed, then he had to say that Mao was wrong.
>>62183932Japan and Germany were firebombed into ash. South Korea was cut off from its industrial heartland, embroiled in the Korean War, and dealt with the threat of imminent invasion. The front lines crossed France not once but twice. None of these countries experienced hunger and starvation on the scale of the Cultural Revolution at any point following World War II. The fact that you have to reach to manmade famines imposed upon occupied territories during total war to compare to what the CCP did to its own citizens during peacetime is itself damning to your case. Either China is the specialest snowflake in the world, incomparable to any other contemporary country, or the Great Leap Forward and its associated death toll was a policy decision driven by structural problems with the Maoist system.>What Deng said about Mao in public was just what was necessary to say in order to justify a rapid change from the policies associated with Mao, which the public had previously been told were the correct policies. This is pure fanfiction. Rank and file CCP members were pissed at the time that the Party wasn’t *more* critical of Mao, if anything. We can’t have a conversation if you believe all public records and historical accounts of the contemporary Chinese political environment were fabricated for 5D chess reasons.
>>62184004*not Cultural Revolution, Great Leap Forward. My bad. Though outside of like the Cambodian genocide there are very few parallels to the Cultural Revolution either.
>>62184004During WW2, in Europe millions of people were executed or starved to death under controlled circumstances.During WW2, Japan sucked a lot of food out of, for example, Indochina, which it occupied at the time, causing famine. Japan was headed for starvation itself at the end of WW2, as the US began mining ports. However, Japan decided to capitulate rather than continue to suffer.After WW2, Germany suffered major lack of food, although this was partly due to the Morgenthau plan, which preceded the Marshall plan.After WW2, Western Europe, South Korea and Japan became vassals within the US empire. Thus, they did not face the same type of threat situation as China did, certainly not after the conclusion of the Korean war.China was not a special snowflake. The circumstances of China's famine can be well compared to the Soviet famine 30 years earlier. A country, that had not much more to offer the world than grain, felt it was a strategic imperative to rapidly develop its heavy industry, because of foreign threats. In order to obtain the money needed for capital investments, large amounts of grain had to be exported. Grain was also needed to feed construction and industrial workers who no longer farmed the fields. The grain was obtained by means of mass collectivization. Since people needed to eat the grain, a side effect of this was starvation. Even back then, China had a very large population, so when China did this, a lot of people starved.My point was that, even though China was was not in a war, China's economy was still operating in a quasi war mode up to the late 1970s, because of the perceived urgent need to prepare for war.I don't think that public records and historical accounts are "fabricated", rather I believe that what is said and written in political contexts is whatever is politically expedient at the time.*modified my post slightly because I misread your post
>>62184137I repeatedly specified post-WWII to try and keep things on an even playing field, but fine, if you want to compare peacetime China to the worst war in human history be my guest. Even the examples you give were horrors imposed by choice upon an outgroup. Yeah Japan might have starved, but that was in the wake of devastating firebombing campaigns that destroyed their agricultural productivity, and as you point out they surrendered before that reality. The German camps and hunger plans were political decisions meant to extract value from occupied territories and fulfill political goals. If your goal with this comparison is to demonstrate that the CCP starved its citizens to extract their value and fulfill political goals, this is psychotic but understandable. It is also completely silly. Wheat literally rotted in the fields. Production cratered. Look at the attached table. Where is the mass export of wheat that should have fed 50 million people? You have net exports in 1959 and 1960, and then after that China is net importing grain and never stopped. You think Mao starved 50 million Chinese people to export an extra 2 million metric tons of grain for a single year? Even if you do, you think that bought enough industrialization to be worth the cost? Especially when for the next decade China was forced to spend multiples of that profit to import grain?South Korea lost 2 million people in the Korean War up to 1959. It has a DMZ on its border to this day. It has a hostile nation 90 miles to the north of its most populous city. In the 1960s it was spending 8% of its GDP on defense. To this day there are bunkers strewn across the countryside, built to guard against North Korean invasion. I would characterize it as extremely motivated reasoning to look at that and call it not a threatening situation.
>>62184169I would agree with you that the Soviet famines are comparable. What was the common factor between China and the USSR from 1950 to 1970 again? The USSR also became a net importer of grain after 1962, by the way. How could they have been purchasing industrialization with exports that didn’t exist?If your position is that anything said and written is fake and should be substituted with what you imagine to have actually occurred in your head, how can we have a conversation about history?
