>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."