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Comment by mazerackham | Hacker News Reader

Another big secret, is that the source of a lot of poverty being lifted is because of China. That's right, that terribly communist government suppressing its people and free speech, is actually responsible for lifting 500 million people out of poverty over the last 30 years. That is definitely a big secret of american media, and something that it neglects to report on, in favor of free speech violations, naval exercises, ip infringement, and "job stealing".

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>That's right, that terribly communist government suppressing its people and free speech, is actually responsible for lifting 500 million people out of poverty over the last 30 years.

There isn't anything recognizably communist about the Chinese system aside from the name. And the big spurt of growth didn't start until Deng's market-based reforms of the '70s.

So a better way to put it would be "After its Marxist fantasy economics resulted in the starvation of more than forty million Chinese people, the government wisely switched to capitalism, which lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty."

That unrecognisably non-communist system still has huge elements of central planning, government control, censorship, and price fixing.

It's hardly a free market paradise.

If you want a free market paradise with minimal government, try Somalia.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/4017147.stm

As long as you cite the BBC's take on Somalia you might as well give it a fair shake:

* http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-12278628 * http://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-12285365

Socialists seem to reliably confuse free markets and anarchy. Somalia isn't in any way a free market economy.

Somalia is to free markets as North Korea is to government regulation.

You're right, China is only communist in name, not in practice for some time now. I emphasized the word only to point out how we treat anything associated with communism as something to be burned at the stake.

Anything associated with communism should be burned at stake. The sooner the better. God bless the Chinese for figuring it out and transitioning out of that retched system.

And most of them are sadly going to go right back into extreme poverty since factories are leaving China, capital is are outflowing, rich people are escaping. Then they realize the farm they left has been commandeered to build empty apartments, their environment polluted to where they will fall victim to diseases.

There is no secret to the communist China's playbook. They opened to the world a vast amount of workers, charging for them pennies a day. But once that has been used up and become too expensive, the end game is joblessness and destruction of their environments. And they still have a totalitarian government.

Do you have any sources to back up what you're saying, or is that your hypothesis?

Also, from your tone it sounds like that is what you hope will happen. I hope that not to be the case.

The hypothesis seems dubious. Their manufacturing is less competitive because wages have risen like ten fold. It's like saying the Chinese will return to poverty because they have become too wealthy.

Here's another "secret":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Chinese_Famine

Not a secret to me. A great tragedy, and definitely a huge error on their record. However, what I said still stands: they lifted 500 million people out of poverty.

Great, so instead of starving to death they can live long boring lives full of grueling work enriching assholes who don't even let them have internet access or freedom of mobility within their own country.

There's a good reason the vast majority of rich Chinese people move to the West. It's an awful place to live if you have a choice.

Haha have you been to China? It's really not as bad as you are imagining. The controls on internet access is not as extreme as portrayed in western media. I'm not sure where this mobility issue is coming from. If you're talking about poor factory workers being constrained, well poor people everywhere have a hard time being mobile. Although at least in China's case, they have some of the world's most developed high speed rails to get between places. Chinese New Year is the world's largest annual migration.

Although many are, the "vast majority" of rich Chinese people are not moving to the West, that's extreme hyperbole. China is full of terrible things: massive income inequality, pollution and smog, corruption, scams, copycat, scandals and more. But there are also amazing things: innovation, one of the world's richest histories, strong families, and a hunger for progress. Life has been improving there for the past 30+ years, not steadily improving, but improving at an explosive pace of progress. It's not "an awful place to live" (at least I hope not for the 1.3 billion people there), and there is far worse you could do on Earth right now.

> Haha have you been to China?

No, and I have no intention to. My girlfriend spent the month of August there visiting her family and complained non-stop about how much she hated it and wanted to come home (and she's a well-off Canadian immigrant from Shanghai).

> The controls on internet access is not as extreme as portrayed in western media.

I write software for a living and it still took me hours to find and set up a VPN + traffic obfuscation solution so I could get my girlfriend on Facebook while she was there. Play Store and Google didn't work at all. Foreign sites that aren't blocked entirely barely function. Even developers at top Chinese tech firms routinely download XCode from sketchy Chinese versions of Dropbox because downloading them from Apple is too slow [1]

> If you're talking about poor factory workers being constrained, well poor people everywhere have a hard time being mobile.

I was referring to the Hukou system (aka the caste system of China) [2]

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2015/09/21...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hukou_system

I can see why your girlfriend would hate it so much, she's coming from Canadian, one of the highest standards of living in the world. You can't expect to go to China, and find that same level of comfort. It was a third world country 20 years ago! It's dirtier, it's poorer, and it's WAYY more crowded. It's polluted, and everyone speaks Chinese. I find it sad that she hated it though, sounds like deep down, she hates a part of herself as well.

As for the VPN access, I also write software for a living, and it took me 5 minutes to get set up with a VPN. It was simply enough that my parents could figure it out as well. I get that the Play Store and Google don't work there, I was referring specifically to the fact that for most intents and purposes, a regular Chinese person could use the internet for most of its glory (porn, games, social, news, shopping).

Hukou is unfortunate and controversial issue there. In some ways it makes sense though, you have a massive population and you want to moderate the effects of massive migration. In other ways it's cruel and unfair. I don't know what to do about that, but I don't know if the U.S. has proven a better method. The fact of the matter is that no government has been in the situation China is in right now. To me, that makes it hard to judge.

Overall, I still find your argument that "it's an awful place to live" uncompelling.

Don t forget theyr internet is RIAA Free. They get services better than netflix for video, free games, .... They may not have access to some foreign website but they get access to a lot of unknown services in the us.

> That's right, that terribly communist government suppressing its people and free speech, is actually responsible for lifting 500 million people out of poverty over the last 30 years.

Indeed, China's success has been a great testimony to the efficacy of centralized planning and communism...

Deng Xio Peng pivoted away from pure central planning. Whether it's actually... efficacious :) remains to be seen.

One economic historian was asked to speak to the Politboro and when he got there, found out they wanted to know why it was that the government of Britain did not fall in the 1870s. These guys know they're riding the tiger.

It looks pretty good right now.

Perhaps American sentiment is based on China's hundreds of years of bad policy relegating those same millions of people to extreme poverty?

[edit: it might be more fair to say decades here, if you believe we can only attribute "policy" to the Communist Party]

I think you're right in your edit, the Community Party has only been in power for decades. Prior to that, China was in turmoil due to colonization and imperialism by the U.S., France, Britain, and other European states, as well as Japan.

I believe it's more accurate to say that the American sentiment is derived from China being a rising world power ideologically backed by Communism, and an actual threat to America's dominance (by some methods, China's GDP has exceeded the U.S. already). As a Chinese American (I've lived in the U.S. all my life), it concerns me that American media shows such an insanely biased and untruthful view of China. Growing anti-Chinese sentiment is not a good thing for me, or my future children.

I actually find it ironic that we Americans believe that the Chinese population believes in false state communist propaganda, but in reality, we suffer from it ourselves, just from free corporate backed media instead.

While changes may be afoot, the one-party system has bred open and notorious corruption and censorship for 30+ years. The Party is also jeopardizing the global economy with its treatment of the market correction, mostly in the interest of defending its own position. I don't think negative American sentiment towards the Party is entirely misplaced.

We have always been at war with EastAsia.

When I was in junior high school, I had to do a project on propaganda. This was during the time of the USSR and I had the great idea to listen to Radio Moscow and compare it to western media. My project was to find examples of different kinds of proganda and I dutifully did so. Eventually I had to find an example of "the big lie". I singled out a story of a big military victory by the USSR (probably in Afghanistan, but I don't really remember). It was not reported in any other news outlet, so I used it as my example of "the big lie". Of course I got an A+ for the project.

Some weeks later, I happened to notice a one paragraph story buried in the back of the newspaper which finally reported the soviet victory. I then started to look for evidence that my other examples of propaganda were incorrect. I readily found such evidence.

I have always felt embarrassed by they episode. It was my first revelation that media outlets have political agenda and that they adjust the way they report news based on that political agenda. But even more important was that I had participated in that agenda by re-reporting that view of the world to my classmates.

It is amazing how easy it is to allow a mixture of arrogance, pride and prejudice to galvanize a view of the world that is just wrong. You then spread that false-certainty to others. Together you work tirelessly to maintain that fiction without ever knowing it.

I have often thought that I wish I could have redone my project on propaganda after I made these realizations. Such is the strength of propaganda, though, I'm quite sure my revised project would have resulted in an F.

The OP does not realize his error, I am quite sure. He probably can not be made to realize his error and will argue vehemently on behalf of the puppet masters pulling the strings of his belief. I think the best we can do is to try to notice the strings pulling our own limbs, for we are surely not immune to this problem.

Very interesting that you've actually experienced this first hand while doing research for a class. I find that the difference in reporting on the same subject matter can be so wildly different, and I find that so confusing. It's so easy to twist stories for your own purpose. I wish there was a better solution.

If it wasn't for Britain and the Opium wars, China would be in a worse position now. China was very closed and very corrupt towards the end of the Manchurian's rule. Britain did exploit China, but their policy was very different than the policy in India, for example, or in NA.

This weak justification for imperialism is dangerous for our future generations. The subjugation and exploitation of technologically weaker peoples for PROFIT, usually under the guise of some self-righteous religion, mandated by god, is something that I hope humanity is done with.

In this case, it was a war fought to force a drug trade. Pathetic.

Yeah, it's a little more complicated than that. The Chinese demanded silver and nothing else whatsoever for their goods, creating MASSIVE trade deficit with all of Europe, sucking practically all of the silver there and then some (from Mexico and Brazil). The traders found a way to get silver from the Chinese (in exchange for opium). Trade loomed even more. Then the Chinese decided to forcefully stop the Opium trade, which would crush their trading partners. This lead to the first Opium war, which was quickly settled, but the Chinese broke their part of the contract which lead to the 2nd Opium war.

it sounds like you're trying to blame China for the Opium War. Fact is, if there was a war right now, fought to force trade of a highly addictive drug on another country, people wouldn't describe it as an opportunity for that country.

The traded goods don't matter. The Chinese government was being unreasonable in their policy. When you are unreasonable you face the consequences. Such is life, there are practicalities we need to consider. We don't live in a utopia.

What do you think will happen if the US suddenly decides to accept nothing else but gold for its dollar?

There's no point in arguing when you talk about historical matters as simply as a fight between your friends. Opium wars are a great example of Imperialism (which is not a good thing, although you seem to try very hard to twist and defend it)

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