Also, the Great Leap Forward wasn’t perfect, but it overwhelmingly succeeded, though the famine was terrible. Even during the Cultural Revolution – which I see as backwards and utopian in many respects – the trend in life expectancy rapidly increasing maintained.
Something a lot of anti-China people don’t want to understand about it. It had a lot of failures, sure, but China actively learned from them and became a stronger nation as a result. I think it is telling that the big part of the GLF that the west talks about is the famine, the natural disaster, the one part China couldn’t learn from their mistake because it was caused by climate conditions, not by direct action. They talk about it almost like China was “smited by god” for daring to be socialist. Like they deviated from the One True Correct Path of Capitalism and faced divine punishment in the form of natural disasters and “authoritarian dictators.”
Also, the Great Leap Forward wasn’t perfect, but it overwhelmingly succeeded, though the famine was terrible. Even during the Cultural Revolution – which I see as backwards and utopian in many respects – the trend in life expectancy rapidly increasing maintained.
Something a lot of anti-China people don’t want to understand about it. It had a lot of failures, sure, but China actively learned from them and became a stronger nation as a result. I think it is telling that the big part of the GLF that the west talks about is the famine, the natural disaster, the one part China couldn’t learn from their mistake because it was caused by climate conditions, not by direct action. They talk about it almost like China was “smited by god” for daring to be socialist. Like they deviated from the One True Correct Path of Capitalism and faced divine punishment in the form of natural disasters and “authoritarian dictators.”