> Also did the communists do a bad job in china? That is at most controversial... not "brain washed".
Controversial? Good lord, Mao's Great Leap Forward killed between 23 and 42 million people in just a few years.
Controversial? Good lord, Mao's Great Leap Forward killed between 23 and 42 million people in just a few years.
Starvation was common before communism (this is second hand "communist propaganda" from my father, probably originally from a similar source to the information the Korean POW's were given), but it wasn't concentrated into a few years like in the great leap forward.
The Korean War - 1950 - 1953.
Until the Great Leap, Mao had done a fantastic job. Life expectancies shot up by about 15 years, as he dismantled feudalism, and established a relatively functional and stable state. Then he undid all the good he'd done, in the 1958, sending life expectancies back to ~35. Then things improved again, when Deng and co managed to contain Mao a little better (though they sometimes had ... issues).
tl;dr - Mao had done a fantastic job, up to 1958, which was well after the Korean War ended.
Could you say the same for Deng Xiaoping (also a communist)?
Post-Mao, well... Hua was a disaster and Deng was never a good communist. Mao himself accused Deng of being a capitalist and banished him to the countryside in the 60s. Once he finally gained power and brought back mild capitalism (really, market socialism), it still took 20 years for China to really get going.
Sane points: Education, Health, both improved under communist rule.
It's also questionable to define the economic system of Deng's China as "communist" in the same way as Soviet Russia and, say, Cuba.