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Comment by janalsncm | Hacker News Reader

100x growth in 20 years starting from 1980 is insane. Would’ve been very interesting to witness.

the migration during the last decades from rural China into the cities has been the largest population migration in the history (something like 800M people moved). One can imagine how future generations will be learning about great migrations - like that of the Goths and Huns in the 4th century or this migration in China in the 20-21st century and the resulting large scale effects on the history lasting for centuries.

Btw, interesting depiction of Shanghai - exterritorial status of the foreign concessions for example - in 1937 in the movie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Eight_Hundred . In the West we sometimes miss that the 2nd Sino-Japanese war can be naturally considered part of the WWII which thus de-facto was already going in the 1937.

> One can imagine how future generations will be learning about great migrations

They won't be. Twisting and erasing history is part and parcel of Chinese education.

Shenzhen received, in 1980, the special legal privilege of engaging in commerce with Hong Kong. It's not natural growth.

That doesn't dull their point; that kind of growth, natural or not, is wild.

That kind of growth is what you see when everyone outside is legally required to be poor.

For a country with nearly one billion poor people, one will never make all of them rich with one step. That is why China "allows some peasants to get rich first", and why they say "Common Prosperity Does Not Mean Equal Wealth" and "Those Who Become Prosperous First Helping Those Who Lag Behind". Although it is truly questionable if those get rich first want to help those lag behind, with a big government, it is more or less realized.

So trickle down economics ?

kind of, but with the actual intent to make it work. the lie behind "trickle down economics" wasn't that it can't or never works as advertised, but that it doesn't automatically happen just by letting people get rich and the reaganites talking about it never intended for it to work. basically every rich country got rich through some form of uneven development

"Trickle down economics" is a loaded term. It's not an actual theory advocated by any economist or politician[0].

[0] https://www.creators.com/read/thomas-sowell/01/14/the-trickl...

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