• OBJECTION!@lemmy.ml
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    4 months ago

    Yeah no shit it was because of the reforms the socialists implemented that they were able to eradicate poverty, not sure how that’s supposed to help your point.

    Life expectancy nearly doubled while Mao was in power. that’s not “one of the biggest disasters in human history,” it was the single greatest improvement in quality of life on such a large scale in such a short time period ever.

    • SleezyDizasta@lemmy.world
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      4 months ago

      Yeah no shit it was because of the reforms the socialists implemented that they were able to eradicate poverty, not sure how that’s supposed to help your point.

      Do you even understand what the reforms were?

      Life expectancy nearly doubled while Mao was in power. that’s not “one of the biggest disasters in human history,” it was the single greatest improvement in quality of life on such a large scale in such a short time period ever.

      Mao killed somewhere between 40 million and 80 million people during his 27 year reign. He is widely considered to be the person responsible for the highest death toll in human history. The Great Leap Forward by itself is estimated to have somewhere between 15 million to 55 million deaths. The Great Chinese famine is the biggest famine ever recorded and is one of the worst anthropogenic disasters in human history. This is not the hill you should die on.

        • SleezyDizasta@lemmy.world
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          4 months ago

          China went through the Opium wars, the Sino-French war, the first Sino-Japanese war, the Russian invasions of northern China, the second Sino-Japanese war that led to the Japanese genocide against the Chinese, the Taiping Rebellion, the North Chinese famine, the Boxer Rebellion, the Dungan Revolt, the Chinese civil war, the Miao rebellion, Red Turban Rebellion, Panthay Rebellion, the Punti–Hakka Clan Wars, the 1911 revolution, the Laogai camps, the land reform movement, the cultural revolution, the Campaign to Suppress Counterrevolutionaries, the Great Leap Forward, and the list goes on and on. All of these events happened within the span of around 150 years, and the estimated death toll for them in aggregate is somewhere between 150 million to 200 million. Do you begin to comprehend how batshit crazy that is? Literally any sort of stability would’ve seen the life expectancy shoot up because there aren’t people dying left and right.

          The same thing happened in Russia. They went through a lot of shit that ended up killing so many people, but once Stalin finally fucked off, the life expectancy went up. The same happened in Germany after WWII or India after the British or so many other countries that went through lots of horrible events in rapid succession. Once a stable government is in place, things will improve no matter how horrible the ruling regime is.

          • OBJECTION!@lemmy.ml
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            4 months ago

            Bzzzt Sorry, that is incorrect.

            You can see various dips in life expectancy prior to the communists coming to power - those dips represent the various wars you mentioned. The baseline, even in times of peace, was still less than 35. It wasn’t just the wars and instability, it was the abject poverty and exploitation that people had been living under. They had frequent famines, zero access to medical care, and most of what the peasants made went straight to the aristocratic landlords. The life expectancy sprung up extremely rapidly following the revolution, when it did not after any of the previous wars, because the main reason for it increasing was not the end of the war but the communists’ policies.

            The communists put a stop to all of that, and though there was a lot of turmoil and missteps, they were enormously successful at improving the quality of life of the people. When they took power, China was a third world country, today, the average life expectancy is higher than that of the US. No other faction, certainly not the Nationalists, or the Japanese, or the warlords, or the Qing, would have been willing or able to do that.

            • SleezyDizasta@lemmy.world
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              4 months ago

              You can see various dips in life expectancy prior to the communists coming to power

              China’s self proclaimed “century of humiliation” never really say any peace time or stability. It was on disaster after another from the late 1700s/early 1800s until 1965-1970. The communists took control over mainland China in 1949. You can clearly see from the graph that you posted that life expectancy was stagnant and even declined between 1950 and 1965, which is well into the communist era. This was when Mao went on his rampages killing the previously mentioned 40 to 80 million people. China did not see stability until Mao’s reign of terror started to weaken due to his old age in the late 60s (He died in 1976). That’s when the life expectancy started rising to normal levels.

              The life expectancy sprung up extremely rapidly following the revolution, when it did not after any of the previous wars, because the main reason for it increasing was not the end of the war but the communists’ policies.

              This is objectively false. Mao’s Marxist policies are precisely what led him to become the single biggest killer in human history. Mao’s death toll rivals the aggregate number of deaths during WWII… by far the bloodiest war in human history that saw some of the worst genocides ever recorded. Most academic estimates show that the higher end of the death toll ranges caused by Mao’s policies is a figure higher than all the people that were murdered under Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin, Hirohito, and Lleopold II combined… some of the worst killers in history.

              The life expectancy sprung up extremely rapidly following the revolution, when it did not after any of the previous wars, because the main reason for it increasing was not the end of the war but the communists’ policies.

              No, in the first half of the 20th century alone, China went through the 1911 revolution, the second Sino-Japanese war, the Chinese civil war, the land reform movement, the cultural revolution, the Campaign to Suppress Counterrevolutionaries, the Great Leap Forward, and the Laogai camps one after another. Millions of people were killed just about every year until the late 1960s. Literally any form of stability would’ve shown the same results.

              The communists put a stop to all of that, and though there was a lot of turmoil and missteps, they were enormously successful at improving the quality of life of the people.

              No, they didn’t. They literally did all of those things. From purges to famines to invading other countries (Tibet and Vietnam) to democide to ruthlessly squashing rebellions. Things only started to improve when Deng Xiaoping implemented the economic reforms in the late 70s and 80s to liberalize the economy and adopt capitalism. That’s when China’s historic rise happened.

              No other faction, certainly not the Nationalists, or the Japanese, or the warlords, or the Qing, would have been willing or able to do that.

              Wtf are you talking about? The Qing was an empire that rules for 200 years before foreign powers started dividing and conquering the empire which eventually led to it’s demise as it wasn’t able to fight all the foreign powers and squash all the rebellions. The Japanese wanted to genocide the Chinese. The warlords wanted to conquer the country for themselves but all failed to do so. The nationalists never had a chance to properly govern until they went to Taiwan.