Hacker News Reader

Comment by Retric | Hacker News Reader

Under the CCP China’s per person growth has been lackluster over the full period 1950 - today relative to many countries. The numbers have improved, but context is always important.

Edited: Used poor numbers for GDP ranking. Trying numbers from here: https://pophealthmetrics.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/... but it's not that fast.

PS: Of note the 1950’s GDP was after a long civil war.

View on HN

ROFL. Never have I seen a more skillful distortion of facts. China's GDP per capita was around $500 per person in 1950, just at subsistence level, whereas it is currently around $9500. Other than a few countries such as South Korea, there are no countries that have advanced so much in that period.

If they have fallen in ranking, that is only because a number of countries became independent after WW2, especially in Europe.

Between 1949 and 1978 they did massively screw up economically while experiencing a population boom, which obviously led to GDP per capita numbers to collapse. On the other hand, since 1978 they've experienced probably the biggest economic boom in human history.

After Mao's death the government was pragmatic enough to realise that if they did not kick start the economy the regime would collapse (as it did in the USSR), and they rightly concluded that socialist economic management does not work.

Beyond that, it's difficult to compare with South Korea (since someone else mentioned that country) just due to the population difference.

Not really. They grew at an average of 6% over Mao’s reign too. The economic progress made was very substantial. In 1948 China was an impoverished, colonised and war-wrecked country with a large proportion of drug addicts. 90% of people were illiterate. By the 60’s it was a major power making large machinery, ships, weapons etc.

The economy was on its knees in 1978 and they had rationing. There is a reason they instigated such drastic changes.

In 1950 China Per capita GDP was 612$ where Ethiopia was $277.00 thus it was well past subsistence levels. Critically as I said this was post civil war which should have allowed for rapid growth in the next few years.

That dataset only has 52 countries for 1950. Their 2010 data has 219 countries. So "rank" isn't a very good way to analyze China's GDP growth over time.

A better way to look at that same data is that Chinese GDP per capita went from being 6% of the American value in 1950, to 16% of the American value in 2010. Relative to American growth, China has grown about 2.5x as much.

Seems like a better benchmark would be South Korea which also ended a civil war in 1953. It also had some rather unpleasant political upheaval and still had better Per capita GDP growth.

Alternatively, Taiwan makes an interesting case study as it’s the other side of that civil war and had much better Per capita growth while starting slightly higher.

South Korea's growth was probably the fastest in history. Every other country, not just China, is slower in comparison.

The Middle East oil states had some truly ridiculous growth starting around 1950. South Korea ‘wins’ over a rather specific time period via sustained growth, but it’s growth rate is not that unusual when you start looking at industrialization and post war recovery.

Germany after world War 1 and 2 did pretty nice though.

Considering the debt they had to pay back.

Look up: Wirtschaftswunder

While I don't dispute that South Korea had amazing growth, was it really faster than "every" other country? How does it compare to Japan? Or Australia?

Japan was a developed country with one of the strongest economy in the world before WWII. They showed a crazy rate of economical growth right after WWII, but I think it was more of a recovery rather than development.

https://www.nippon.com/en/in-depth/a04003/lessons-from-the-j...

Mostly faster than Japan or Australia, although the crown for highest GDP growth in a single year goes to Rwanda for growing 35% in 1995 after shrinking by 50% the year before.

https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.KD.ZG?conte...

https://www.gapminder.org/tools/#$chart-type=linechart

You can play around with that to see

Interesting fact is that North Korea actually grew faster and recovered from the war quicker right up to the 70’s.

And ~1400 China used to represent 30% of the world economy. They are now only at 18%.

More seriously, every indicators points to a general improvement. In term of economy, China went from representing 4% of the world economy to the 18% mentioned previously.

On a more "individual quality of life" side of things, life expectancy went from 45 years in 1950 to 65 at the end of Mao Zedong era (1975) to 76 years today.

> PS: Of note the 1950’s GDP was after a long civil war.

That's a bit of an understatement... China basically spent over a century in turmoil, starting with the First Opium War then the Second, various revolts, the Boxers Rebellion, the 2 sino-japanese wars (with the second far from a pretty story...) and in the end, a civil war (and that's a very incomplete list). This period is remembered as the Century of Humiliation.

Basically China is regaining its natural place in the world order.

That’s one way to look at it.

Economically they are 18% of world GDP and 1.7/7.7 = 18% of world population. So, it’s going to get increasingly hard to improve.

Ops typo 1.4 billion / 7.7 billion = 18%.

The percentile rank of China's GDP per capita was 13.7 among listed countries in 1950. [0] As of recently it's 44.5. [1] You have to standardize the information to make a meaningful comparison, since there are more countries nowadays.

0: https://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/stats/Economy/GDP-...

1: https://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/stats/Economy/GDP/...

Good point though there was 100-105 nations in 1950 depending on how you count vs 195 +? in the world today.

I did not know C++ was running China.

The correct acronym is actually CPC (Communist Party China), but English speakers often use CCP to mean CPC.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communist_Party_of_China

The poster had written CPP when I replied to them. The rest of their comment (i.e. looking at ranking of GDP per capita) was as poorly thought out as their spelling of China’s ruling party.

Communist Party >of< China

Edit: Why the downvotes? The parent comment wrote "Communist Party China".

Addendum: CCP can be interpreted as the Chinese Communist Party.

CPP doesn't mean C++ in this context.

It means C preprocessor.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com