This is less than a 30 year period. How did they manage to do a culture speed run? Mao and Deng completely transformed an agrarian society still wearing Qing clothing to a modern economic power within a half century.
>>16555310Communism works, simple as. Of course it needs to be tempered and managed, but as a force it pushes for development.
>>16555310lots of cash from the western countries to replace their industrial base and a massive propaganda campaign in favour of consumerism"to get rich is glorious" - deng
>>16555310Turns out authoritarian no regulation capitalism (until a certain level) is the most effective way to get rich
>>16555310And then another 30 years- China in the 90'sHow the FUCK did they change so much? They lived the same lifestyle for thousands of years and then within 50... Like did Chinese people eventually become desensitized to change?
>>16555331damn what a qt
>>16555331>desensitized
>>16555331No. I just think that we reached a sort of critical mass in industrialization that it just became easier to do because innovation begets further innovation. China is also one of the most populist states on Earth. If only 10 percent of them moved to cities to do industrial work, that's still about a population size comparable to some western nations.
much of China is still agrarian
>>1655573470% of China is urbanized by now.
>>16555310Usually the answer is they didn't. China had growing industry even in the 1920's, it was just scattered around and the political situation wasn't helping, that being said most of the bigger industrial hubs of 1925 are still industrial hubs for a reason.Also the character of the Chinese hasn't changed a bit. You can read some scathing book about them like The Ways that are Dark and see a lot of parallels with modern Chinese, the cultural revolution didn't even move the needle at least as far as their bad aspects were concerned.Especially as the CCP reformed the economy after Mao, to the point where it resembles the wet dream of Chang Kai Shek more than anything else, the perception of CCP as anything but a strange new dynasty of China has became void.
>>16555838>Also the character of the Chinese hasn't changed a bit. You can read some scathing book about them like The Ways that are Dark and see a lot of parallels with modern Chinese, the cultural revolution didn't even move the needle at least as far as their bad aspects were concerned.please elaborate
>>16555740quick google shows about 500 million to be rural, so that doesn't seem quite right
>>16556132well when china has nearly 1.5 billion people in all, it seems quite reasonable that 500 million of them (a third of the population) would be in the country. so yeah, it makes sense that 70% of china is urbanized
>>16555310The mastery of Dengism-Xiism. i.e. Do the absolute bare minimum, win
>>16555313Another way to see it is that the competitive side of life (the market) is facilitated by the co-operative side of life (the state), but the state also checks market forces through violence. Thus the market doesn't capture and wreck the state.
>>16556163"rural" in china means peasants without electricity
It's just a big coincidence that China was a dirt poor shithole until foreign investors and foreign consumers (free trade) showed up. It was actually all because of communism that had only created poverty up until the 80s but suddenly started to create wealth in the 90s.
>>16556386Now that's false. You could go anywhere in China at this point, it's not going to look that bad. The high speed train that I was on when I visited there literally cut through vast rural areas, that had roads that were better looking that even American ones in the middle of a city.