Rapid growth since then has largely been the result of a return to more normal governance quality, combined with a very low base. It’s a big improvement, but that doesn’t mean policy has been amazing—they’ve just stopped being so abjectly terrible.
This might be nitpicky, but still probably worth pointing out, because I think it is symptomatic of Western observers’ tendency to talk past Chinese interlocutors on subjects like this.
It is objectively quite extraordinarywhat China under the CCP has seen in terms of economic growth and development. That is a really hard intellectual problem for us liberal democrats (and especially consequentialists). You can believe the CCP is net bad, totalitarian regime in the status quo—I think this—but dismissing what it managed to do post-Mao for the Chinese economy requires ignoring the wealth (no pun intended) of evidence about how uniquely strong Chinese growth has been, which suggests the CCP was doing more than just not being abjectly terrible.
China’s GDP per capita in the late 1970s, shortly after Mao’s death and the initiation of Deng Xiaoping’s Reform and Opening Up, was a fraction of the average in Sub-Saharan Africa (World Bank: China, SSA)! Playing around with Our World in Data charts, which only go back to 1990, also really underscores this. China was dirt poor for basically the entire 20th century, in no small part due to historically bad abuses and mismanagement by the CCP up until about 1980—and in the historical blink of an eye it turned things around.
Things like the mass incarceration and cultural genocide of Uyghurs, forced sterilizations and abortions under the one-child policy, and plenty of other post-Mao abuses and human rights catastrophes are real. But an educated, reasonable Chinese person could certainly shoot back: so is the near elimination of e.g. child malnutrition, or the complete elimination of malaria, both of which are still rampant in neighboring, (mostly) democratic India, which was richer than China back in the 1970s.
Have you checked it was uniquely strong? Just off the top of my head Taiwan and (especially) South Korea both grew very rapidly too, under “right-wing” dictatorships and then (at least with SK, less sure about when Taiwan stopped growing rapidly) under democracy as well. I don’t dispute the general point that the CCPs developmental record is very impressive, but that’s still importantly different from “their system achieved things no one has ever achieved under another system”.
You’re right, I should be more careful in wording; I’ve struck “uniquely”. China is unique in the sheer scale of such growth given the size of its population, but the Asian Tigers + Japan also had very high growth rates. I think the gist of my original point still stands: growth did not happen in these countries because the ruling parties just stopped doing really bad things, but, generally, the regimes (excluding Japan) engaged in extensive economic reform that is by no means a guaranteed success (cf. Russia).
This might be nitpicky, but still probably worth pointing out, because I think it is symptomatic of Western observers’ tendency to talk past Chinese interlocutors on subjects like this.
It is objectively quite extraordinary what China under the CCP has seen in terms of economic growth and development. That is a really hard intellectual problem for us liberal democrats (and especially consequentialists). You can believe the CCP is net bad, totalitarian regime in the status quo—I think this—but dismissing what it managed to do post-Mao for the Chinese economy requires ignoring the wealth (no pun intended) of evidence about how
uniquelystrong Chinese growth has been, which suggests the CCP was doing more than just not being abjectly terrible.China’s GDP per capita in the late 1970s, shortly after Mao’s death and the initiation of Deng Xiaoping’s Reform and Opening Up, was a fraction of the average in Sub-Saharan Africa (World Bank: China, SSA)! Playing around with Our World in Data charts, which only go back to 1990, also really underscores this. China was dirt poor for basically the entire 20th century, in no small part due to historically bad abuses and mismanagement by the CCP up until about 1980—and in the historical blink of an eye it turned things around.
Things like the mass incarceration and cultural genocide of Uyghurs, forced sterilizations and abortions under the one-child policy, and plenty of other post-Mao abuses and human rights catastrophes are real. But an educated, reasonable Chinese person could certainly shoot back: so is the near elimination of e.g. child malnutrition, or the complete elimination of malaria, both of which are still rampant in neighboring, (mostly) democratic India, which was richer than China back in the 1970s.
Have you checked it was uniquely strong? Just off the top of my head Taiwan and (especially) South Korea both grew very rapidly too, under “right-wing” dictatorships and then (at least with SK, less sure about when Taiwan stopped growing rapidly) under democracy as well. I don’t dispute the general point that the CCPs developmental record is very impressive, but that’s still importantly different from “their system achieved things no one has ever achieved under another system”.
You’re right, I should be more careful in wording; I’ve struck “uniquely”. China is unique in the sheer scale of such growth given the size of its population, but the Asian Tigers + Japan also had very high growth rates. I think the gist of my original point still stands: growth did not happen in these countries because the ruling parties just stopped doing really bad things, but, generally, the regimes (excluding Japan) engaged in extensive economic reform that is by no means a guaranteed success (cf. Russia).