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Tankies take a break to deny some genocide
(sh.itjust.works)
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this post was submitted on 14 Oct 2024
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MeanwhileOnGrad
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They have a point, though. Compare life expectancy in China --even during the Great Leap Forward and the Four Pests Campaign to life in (for example) colonized India. Communism wasn't great, but compare it to the alternative. I'm not a fan of China, i'm an anarchist, but some of the criticism is just red scare bullshit and not backed by facts.
It's important to note that India was also reeling from a very rocky partition with no Western support or severance. I personally think a more apt comparison is North and South Korea, I don't even need to show you their comparison
Still, when compared to its Western rivals, China doesn't look nearly as impressive, especially not in current times where China remains near the bottom (though still above India, that's not much of a brag.)
Regardless, please take note of their denial and praise of genocide--That's the centre topic to focus on here
I don't think North vs South Korea is a real comparison at all. First of all, it's not what the post is talking about. Secondly, the North Korean government is not materially Communist in nature. Thirdly, there are some additional factors in play that are depressing North Korea's economic and medical ability, such as sanctions from the West. Not that i think North Korea would beat South Korea without the sanctions or anything, i doubt it would be particularly close.
China is catching up to the US, thanks to the US's insane and dysfunctional health care system. They're not going to beat Europe any time soon, but that's a tough ask. Europe is doing quite well, and has been for a long time.
It's not like China's revolution was smooth sailing, either. I think that's partly why those two are a reasonable comparison, despite being so different in so many ways. They were both doing about as poorly as each other on life expectancy up to their respective revolutions--in fairness, India was doing a little worse by the life expectancy metric but not by much.
Isn't North and South Korea the best comparison for life expectancy versus communism/capitalism? One's communist, the other is capitalist, and both received incredible funding and infrastructure from both superpowers. I mean look! Doesn't this add to the fact that everyone's life expectancy increased, not just one country soaring past the others?
Regardless tho~ The main point is the whole genocide-denying part.
No, specifically because North Korea is not communist in any meaningful sense of the word. There's no reason to believe it is representative of a generic communist state, and it does not compare well to the majority (to any?) of the communist states out there. Even if you do consider it communist, it is an outlier among those states. It simply does not make sense.
That chart does show North and South Korean life expectancies increasing at a similar rate (until the mid 90s, of course) but that does not mean there's no difference in other states. Yes, life expectancy has been increasing globally but it is not uniformly distributed. China went from "average" to "above average" since the Communist Revolution. India went from "below average" to "below average".
We could also look at Cuba or Vietnam as examples (looking at 2020). They're much smaller and i don't have the same kind of data on hand for them, but compared to the global numbers they're closer to the "more developed countries" than they are to the global average. Again, India, is down in the "less developed countries". If you care, North Korea is at 75 in 2020, above the global average despite... everything going on there. And yes, for the record, South Korea is doing better. They're doing better than most, even better than (for example) Germany.
(I do not know how trustworthy those numbers are for North Korea tbh. I know China's 2020 and beyond numbers have also been criticized but I'm working with what I have.)
And yes, life expectancy is not the be-all, end-all measurement of all value. It does matter, though.
Okay. 1965 - Chinese life expectancy was 44.
1965 - Indian life expectancy was 44.
Just look at the graph of Asia 1959. That is the Great Chinese Famine - the cause of which lies very much with the CCP.
(In particular, it lies with the aforementioned "four pests" campaign though there were plenty of other horrible decisions made around that time.)
Alright then, fine. Pulling out some actual stats:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1041350/life-expectancy-china-all-time/
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1041383/life-expectancy-india-all-time/
At the worst part of the Great Leap Forward, China was still slightly ahead of India: 44.6 to 43. Everywhere else (and to this day), they're meaningfully ahead. (How Communist they are in the modern era may be up for debate, though.) The Chinese Communist Revolution took place over a long period of time but was pretty well concluded by 1949. India got its independence in 1947, at a very similar time. Ten years later is roughly the period we're talking about, but ten years after that China has pulled well ahead of India. In 1970, China's life expectancy was 55 while India's was 46.
In addition to that, let's take a look at conditions before the respective revolutions. In China, life was pretty horrible. Life expectancy was flat and only started going up toward the end of the Communist Revolution. In India, under British rule, it was even worse. This isn't a small detail, it is a major, catastrophic failure of The West and colonialist capitalism in general. If we're saying Communist China was bad because of the Four Pests campaign then what kind of failure does that make Britain, which failed to address the horrendous living conditions in India for decades?
"Pulled ahead" might make more sense if they were at the same position in 1950, around when they got their independence. They were not. There's a 7 year gap between them in 1950, and by 1965 there's a two year gap. Great success, China! Really pulled ahead by (checks notes) letting India catch up.
As did life expectancy everywhere else in the world at the same time. Must be that worldwide revolution I keep hearing so much about.
1945 life expectancy in India: 32, according to the source you provided.
1945 life expectancy in China: 33, according to the source you provided.
Fuck's sake.
You know there are easier ways to critique colonialism and capitalism than trying to bootlick Mao and the CCP, right?
1965 is again the one point at which they actually overlap in any meaningful way. Let's look at that 20 year time period: in 1950, India was at 34, in 1970 it was at 46. In other words, from approximately 20 years after India gained independence its life expectancy increased by 12. In 1950, China was at 40, in 1970 it was at 55. In approximately 20 years since the Communist revolution, life expectancy increased by 15. I think it's relevant that India was starting from further back but i don't think that's the only thing that mattered
Both India and China came a long way from the start of the 20th century and it's a little insulting to suggest they have not. Looking at the statista numbers again, the global average was an appalling 31 in 1900. India was an even more appalling 22, by comparison China was actually doing well at 32. By 2020, the global average has risen to 73 while China is now beating that even more at 76.6 and India is not quite there at 69. (An increase of 44.6 for China, a comparatively better 47 for India, and 42 for the world.) For comparison to that, the United States was at 46 in 1900 and rose to 79 in 2020, a lesser but still not bad 33 years improvement. Western Europe is similar.
Life expectancy has improved globally, but both India and China have beaten the average.
Try looking at, say, 1900 or any of the period prior to that. It was below the global average, it was bad and it was bad for a hundred years. In fact, comparing a hundred years back to 1900 it was actually decreasing in India over those hundred years. China wasn't doing great, but it was doing better prior to the Communist Revolution than India was under Colonial rule.
I'm licking any fucking boots, here, and i'm not about to overlook the evils of colonialism. I am dealing with the numbers.
"In 20 years, the historically developed ethnostate increased its life expectancy three (3) more years than a country which, to this day, lacks a common ethnicity or language and whose development has been uneven at best"
Wow, great work CCP, I bow before the Great Leaps Forward of Mao.
You thought it relevant enough to completely ignore it until it was pointed out, how sweet.
You quite clearly are licking boots in trying to justify the horrific crimes of Mao and the CCP by playing some "Life expectancy went UP" game while ignoring contemporary trends and trying to play 'whataboutism' games with India using some dubious reading of life expectancy statistics to try to prove that Stalinist-style totalitarianism of the kind that even the Soviet Union had abandoned by that time was actually A Net Good(tm).
Would you kindly read aloud for the class what your own source says is the life expectancy of the two countries at 1900?
I also love how the argument goes from "Life expectancy went UP when the Communist Party came into power! Correlation is causation!" to "Well, they beat the average world life expectancy 40 years later!"
We're fucking done here, bootlicker.
This is a weird ass argument. China was not a historically developed ethnostate during this time period. It had--and still has, much to the disappointment of its leaders--a number of different ethnic groups. Just because the Han dominate modern Chinese society does not mean there are no other ethnic groups there. China did not have a common language at this time, either, though it's working hard to stamp them all out but one.
I was aware of this before you pointed it out, but i didn't feel like it warranted inclusion. That's not the one true measurement, either. It isn't my job, here, to include every possible alternate look at the data. I'm not writing a doctoral thesis here, this isn't a "gotcha". There's still really only one period where India wins this comparison, and it's during a historically dramatic (and, yes, self-inflicted) famine in China.
I am doing no such thing. Don't read weird bullshit into my arguments.
These are different numbers and... don't really refute anything i said? "Life expectancy" is different from "life expectancy from birth" and i have been careful to compare like-for-like in this thread.
This is a sound argument and it does mean we can't draw definitive conclusions from this, but these numbers do contradict the narrative that everything in China (or whatever Communist country you like) is horrible.
Cool.
Ah, so Israel isn't an ethnostate either, because other ethnicities exist, lmao
"These are different numbers"
It's literally the link you provided, lmao