> But feel free to mouth the CCP line of China being a great victim

This crosses into nationalistic flamewar, which we ban accounts for, so please don't do it again. More generally, please don't post aggressive snark here, or any snark.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

For a start, things before 1950 still happened. Even during the decades you admit happened, those areas refused to acknowledge the existence of China, making trade impossible.

Early Maoist policy hadn't helped matters, but it's pretty hard to argue American, Japanese, and European policy hadn't already left them in an incredibly shitty position.

Are you saying that China was not a victim? They literally had millions of civilian deaths in WWII. I've seen figures from 14 million to 20 million. Never mind the destructive effects of western imperialism up to that point.

As for Mao holding back China, no doubt there were big problems. But the greatest increases in life expectancy at birth came under Mao [1] and his push to greatly expand access to medical care and education in rural areas. That was itself an investment which set the stage for future growth. (It's a lot easier to get things done when your people aren't dying at age 45.)

[1] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.LE00.IN?location...