Posted on 03/02/2020 8:34:03 AM PST by karpov
Under widespread criticism for praising the achievements of an authoritarian dictatorship, Bernie Sanders last week defended himself by praising another authoritarian dictatorship.
Seeking to explain his decades-long defense of Cuban dictator Fidel Castro’s education and healthcare policies, the Democratic presidential frontrunner cited China’s combination of authoritarian rule and economic growth as praiseworthy.
“China is an authoritarian country, becoming more and more authoritarian,” Sanders said during a CNN town hall meeting Monday night. “But can anyone deny, the facts are clear, that they have taken more people out of extreme poverty than any country in history?”
He made the same point in an interview with The Hill last August.
The implication was obvious: An authoritarian, socialist country had achieved the world’s most impressive economic growth. So socialism has its virtues.
Hundreds of millions of Chinese have escaped extreme poverty, but Sanders has the characterization exactly backwards. China’s embrace of socialism after World War II trapped historic numbers of people in poverty while much of the rest of the world grew. The country’s rapid growth of the last four decades was ignited by the government’s switch from socialist economic planning to market capitalism.
“Since China began to open up and reform its economy in 1978, GDP growth has averaged almost 10 percent a year, and more than 850 million people have been lifted out of poverty,” begins the World Bank’s overview of China’s economy.
The growth trigger was “open up and reform.”
China experienced economic growth after World War II, but the forced collectivization of Mao’s “Great Leap Forward” (1958-62) destroyed internal markets, devastated agricultural production, placed industrialization under the direction of party officials (to keep it out of the hands of capitalists), and suppressed private business activity.
The Great Leap Forward caused mass starvation on a historic scale
(Excerpt) Read more at insidesources.com ...
The Chinese may have taken more people out of extreme poverty than any other culture in the history of the world, but then they had a VERY much larger pool of people in extreme poverty than any other country has ever had. And for that matter, they STILL have more people in extreme poverty than any nation today.
There may be pockets of the world where depth of poverty is greater than any in China, but then, those regions are marked by even lower literacy rates and access to resources.
American Free Traitors™ made tons of money by giving away the store to the ChiComs and selling out the American work force..
China uses a lot of SLAVE labor. That is not taking anyone out of poverty but the slave owners. Bernie is a dum arse.
In China, those people probably go stand in a line all day to come home with a bag of rice and a liter of milk...when it's their day to get rice. There are no choices, no convenience, nothing more than a meager subsistence.
Those same Chinese are probably living in huts and in 400 square-foot flats on top of each other, dimly lit with some small appliance bulb.
In the US, our people in "poverty" have debit cards to essentially buy healthy foods from whatever their local supermarket is. Whether or not they do, or whether or not they blow it on less healthy foods is up to them. They have apartments and housing--again, most don't appreciate it because they get most things from some government program or another.
Our US anti-poverty programs encourage generational living from the teat of government...these are Bernie people. They know nothing else.
Bernie is right, for once.
Mao's Campaign to Suppress Counterrevolutionaries, Mao's Great Leap Forward and the resulting Great Chinese Famine, his Cultural Revolution, Tibet, Tiananmen Square, and the rest accounted for 50 million to 65 million dead - people that Chinese communism took out of poverty . . . the hard way.
Is he counting the millions they killed?
Brilliant observation!
Sanders is a kook.
“Let him rave on, that others may know him mad”.
Bourgeois Bernie has a plan...
The “independent”...LIAR....almost 20 years as a fraud in the body politic. Go home crazy B.S.
Well-stated pic.
Yes, I thought so too.
[I could be completely wrong about this, but lifting 850 million Chinese out of poverty looks completely different than what we do here in the States.
In China, those people probably go stand in a line all day to come home with a bag of rice and a liter of milk...when it’s their day to get rice. There are no choices, no convenience, nothing more than a meager subsistence. ]
When someone among China’s working poor wants to buy food, he goes to the grocery store, where he pays with whatever meager cash he’s scrounged up from some low-level job like working security for a local commercial strip. Oddly enough, some of the best blue collar jobs involve working (indirectly) for foreign companies via their subcontractors. Companies that manufacture for household names like Apple, Hamilton Beach, Hewlett Packard, etc, are well-known for generous benefits and pay packages, relative to local Chinese employers. But regardless, Chinese wages already exceed all of Latin America except for Chile:
they have taken more people out of extreme poverty than any country in history?”
____________________
Right out of poverty and straight into either prison or the grave.
After Mao died, Deng Tsaioping (sp?) took over.
Deng was vilified by the Maoists & his fanatical Red Guards as a capitalist roader who betrayed Mao’s communist revolution.
And he did— by allowing a reintroduction of western investment and profit-driven production, and opening China to competitive trade with the west.
It was Mao who drove the Chinese masses to starvation, and Deng who rescued them.
Which proves our point, and destroys Bernie’s.
It wasn’t Mao’s socialism that lifted the Chinese out of poverty. It was western capitalism post Mao.
Socialism (which is an *economic* system) and communism (which is socialism’s ruling *political* system) will fail EVERY TIME and need capitalism to bail them out EVERY TIME.
We need to know our history well enough to counter the Bernie-bots.
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