Comments by "Winston Smith" (@kryts27) on "The Man Who Modernized China" video.

  1. I don't necessarily agree with this. Rural China, on the whole, has not benefitted from any improvement in China's GDP in the past 30 years. Mao only destroyed what remained of China's overall economy (particularly the rural economy). The rural economy in China did benefit from the end of Mao's dead hand (literally and figuratively) in the 1980s, but fell behind relatively when the cities took off in the 1990s. China's rural sector suffers from a radically aging workforce, fields lying fallow from a lack of labour in a still labour intensive sector (China's rural sector is still radically under-mechanized), heavy and uncontrolled pollution from industry, land reclamation for ghost cities without compensation, and an over-use of organochloride pesticides which have been banned in the Western world in the 1980s and 1990s. China now imports 24% of it's food needs, something that did not happen under Deng Xiaoping's rule. Even Vietnam, a Communist state and a much smaller country exports rice from a production surplace, so unlike Vietnam, China has systematically mismanaged it's rural sector for the past 30 years. China's rural population is still half the population of China, so " lifting 800 million people out of poverty" is a false piece of propaganda slogan set by the CCP. Many of China's farmers remain the poorest in Asia.
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