Hacker News Reader

Comment by yourbandsucks | Hacker News Reader

China's record for the last 40 years is lifting billions of people out of poverty while we stomped around bombing places and killing millions in the name of exporting our awesome values. Oh, and our infra is falling apart compared to theirs while we spend all our money on bombs.

Let's make a compromise -- China can run their country and we can run ours. Is that so controversial?

View on HN

You don't get points on your track record for lifting people out of poverty when you're the one who put them there in the first place.

There are still Chinese people today who remember the pain of the Cultural Revolution. This is a history that isn't denied & only lightly censored if at all. Yet, they don't begrudge Mao for it. Probably because they realize that without having united as a country, and without having built that industrial base (as painful as that was), the good years they're seeing today would never have happened.

I feel like comments like this are why china is the way it is.

They put those people in poverty in the first place during the cultural revolution.

Let's not forget that time just before your carefully chosen "40 years" where they starved 50 million people due to central planning.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Leap_Forward#Famine_deat...

Mao tried to have Deng killed, and Xi was sent to a re-education camp during that time. I’m not sure “they” is the correct term here.

I think OP meant "they" in reference to the CCP kleptocracy more broadly

But you and they are calling maoism and dengism "basically the same thing". That's about half a degree from calling communism and capitalism the same thing. With Chinese characteristics for both, of course.

Anybody who knew China would know exactly why I picked 40 years. It's 2 very different governments.

So I get that you'd consider them "the enemy" in both cases but could this be a teachable moment?

How has America typically done when we wade into shit we don't understand, perfectly convinced that we're the good guys?

How has it typically worked out for the 'liberated'?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com