this post was submitted on 16 Mar 2025
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I fully agree about the often overlooked and very serious downsides of the policies adopted in the 80s and 90s. If the Cultural Revolution swung too far to the left, Reform and Opening Up definitely swung too far to the right in many respects. Luckily under Xi Jinping (and partly his predecessor) they realized this and made much needed corrections.
I don't agree that there were less poor people in Mao's China. I think we should be careful not to idealize that period too much either. Yes a lot of progress was achieved during that time but there was still an enormous amount of poverty. What there was much less of was inequality.
But i think we can safely say that in objective terms the material conditions are much improved today, across the board.
By Xi Jinping's predecessor, who do you mean exactly? Hu Jintao, Jiang Zemin, Zhou Enlai? I know that Jintao was Xi's immediate predecessor, but I think it can be argued that it was more of a team effort that paid the way for Xi Jinping.
I'm not saying that you aren't saying it wasn't a team effort, I just mean specifically in this context.
I agree that idealizing the Maoist era isn't a good or helpful thing, and there were a lot of problems. And as I said, I don't know if there are actually more poorer people in modern China than during the Mao era, but I find it incredibly hard to believe that the modern era isn't the best of China's history, and I figure that for over 80 percent of the countries' population, their living standards are at their highest point in all of history.