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Comment by bkeroack | Hacker News Reader

> Adds the voice of a civic minded, non-profit entity to the board.

Wat. We are talking about the PRC here. A totalitarian communist regime. "Less brutal"?

Than pure capitalism? That's caused enough human suffering that I'd give the PRC a 50/50 chance to be less brutal when all is said and done. Before anyone comes in and talks about all the pain and human suffering that capitalism allievated through progress, such as all the people lifted out of poverty, you have to give the PRC the same credit for what it's done for it's citizens

I think that you’re forgetting the scale of human misery caused by Mao and his cult of personality. In the west we talk a lot about Stalin and Hitler. Mao was up there in the hall of fame of “evil butchers of the 20th century”.

The fact that China has managed to prosper where places like Russia that underwent a similar type of regime have been stuck in the mud is a testament to the enduring Chinese culture.

I'm not forgetting. I'm not even saying that the PRC is within a light year of good. I'm saying that if the comparison is to pure capitalism then it's got even odds of being less brutal because _both_ are spectacularly brutal. That they manage to help people at times is entirely coincidental.

The PRC has black prison sites for political dissidents and the famine from the great leap forward. Capitalism has child slaves working cocoa farms or pharmaceutical companies giving aids tainted medicine to third world countries because it would net them a profit.

I missed your distinction of “pure” capitalism. Thanks for reinforcing/clarifying that.

Modulo the 60-90 million killed under Mao

What did it do to bring its citizens out of poverty?

This is obvious: the Chinese government stopped interfering with the people who already had a culture for business and development. Deng simply stopped Mao's disasterous policies and china started to thrive.

That's a big part of it.

The other thing the government has done (at least in the last couple of decades) is a big push in to transportation infrastructure - bridges, highways, high-speed rail. All of these things help in opening up the economy of previously isolated regions.

Yes. But that isn't especially a communist thing. There is no special formula to China's success beyond getting out of the way and eliminating barriers.

Ironically enough, much of China's transportation infrastructure is supposed to turn a profit, leading to still fairly high logistic costs.

> But that isn't especially a communist thing.

It's not, however unlike other countries, by being authoritarian they can get things done. Compare for example a proposed high-speed rail line between Melbourne and Sydney, which has been under investigation since the 80's and it still hasn't gone beyond the basic planning stage.

And it's not like there isn't demand, Melbourne->Sydney is currently the 5th busiest air route in the world.

There are good reasons for that. Each time I rode the hsr in china, the car I was in was pretty empty. I'm not sure if this line (BJ to GZ) made much sense demand wise. Sure the government can push through face glorifying project, but whenever it rains heavily in southern china everything floods because investing in basic drainage isn't sexy enough.

> whenever it rains heavily in southern china everything floods because investing in basic drainage isn't sexy enough.

Same thing happens in northern China also :-)

Yes, tough to be fair, beijing gets a bad storm once every 4 years that causes the subway stations to flood (I had nice flood pictures for zhichunlu stations back in 2008 but lost them...it was basically a huge swimming pool). Cities in southern china have to put up with it every year (that and bloody no indoor heating makes living there a no-no for me).

Built a metric fuck ton of infrastructure? Manipulated it's currencies so that it's burgeoning manufacturing industries could become the factory of the world?

I get if you have a problem with the bad things they did but it's disingenuous for people to say all the positive consequences of the side they support was because of specific actions on their sides part, while the side they dislike had good things happen by coincidence or in spite of themselves

Sinologists have a long running debate as to whether the CPC should be praised for the Chinese Economic Miracle™ or if the Cultural Revolution just set the bar really, really low. Either way the "iron rice bowl" was as a genuine phenomenon.

I believe the phrase is 'capitalism with Chinese characteristics'? China has admitted for a long time that their economy can't work without capitalism. It's simply a different take on impure capitalism (and the world has never known pure capitalism).

The phrase is 'socialism with Chinese characteristics', which we in the west call 'capitalism'.

Deng Xiaoping was a smart chap. He knew China needed capitalism, but also knew that after decades of railing against capitalism there was no way the people would support it and no way to implement it without undermining the government, and so 'Socialism with Chinese Characteristics' was born.

How is a state which allows and encourages wage labour and trade 'communist'? Totalitarian everyone agrees on, as to whether it is Communist or Socialist other than in name is heavily doubtful.

State intervention in a capitalist economy does not the abolition of the value-form make, it makes a state capitalist economy.

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