China – Reality v Propaganda
Mon 5:26 pm +00:00, 16 Dec 2024
Source: https://www.unz.com/runz/american-pravda-propaganda-hoaxes-vs-chinese-reality/
Copious citizen journalism at this link which shows you today’s China, filmed by Western travellers
Take your pick, he lists dozens of videos
The improvements to the lives of ordinary Chinese folk are breath taking
Here is a snippet from the middle of Ron Unz’s article which gives some economic statistics and backgound
“In 2012 I published an article summarizing some of these accomplishments:
The rise of China surely ranks among the most important world developments of the last 100 years…
Adjusted for purchasing power, most Chinese in 1980 had an income 60–70 percent below that of the citizens in other major Third World countries such as Indonesia, Nigeria, Pakistan, and Kenya, none of which were considered great economic success stories. In those days, even Haitians were far wealthier than Chinese…
During the three decades to 2010, China achieved perhaps the most rapid sustained rate of economic development in the history of the human species, with its real economy growing almost 40-fold between 1978 and 2010. In 1978, America’s economy was 15 times larger, but according to most international estimates, China is now set to surpass America’s total economic output within just another few years…
A World Bank report recently highlighted the huge drop in global poverty rates from 1980 to 2008, but critics noted that over 100 percent of that decline came from China alone: the number of Chinese living in dire poverty fell by a remarkable 662 million, while the impoverished population in the rest of the world actually rose by 13 million…
China’s economic progress is especially impressive when matched against historical parallels. Between 1870 and 1900, America enjoyed unprecedented industrial expansion, such that even Karl Marx and his followers began to doubt that a Communist revolution would be necessary or even possible in a country whose people were achieving such widely shared prosperity through capitalistic expansion. During those 30 years America’s real per capita income grew by 100 percent. But over the last 30 years, real per capita income in China has grown by more than 1,300 percent.
All of this follows the pattern of Lee Kwan Yew’s mixed-development model, combining state socialism and free enterprise, which raised Singapore’s people from the desperate, abject poverty of 1945 to a standard of living now considerably higher than that of most Europeans or Americans, including a per capita GDP almost $12,000 above that of the United States. Obviously, implementing such a program for the world’s largest population and on a continental scale is far more challenging than doing so in a tiny city-state with a population of a few million and inherited British colonial institutions, but so far China has done very well in confounding its skeptics.
Consider that in 1980, the Chinese population overwhelmingly consisted of desperately impoverished peasants, far poorer than Haitians. And compare that recent past with those videos of China’s enormous, futuristic cities, now among the most advanced in the entire world, with nearly all of those gleaming, towering edifices constructed in just the last two or three decades. Obviously, nothing like this has ever previously happened in the history of the world.
The drone-based video embedded above depicts the city of Shenzen. In the late 1970s that place had been a small town of about 25,000, filled with poor fishermen. But in less than fifty years, its population has grown nearly a thousand-fold, creating the wealthiest city in all of China and the third largest after Shanghai and Beijing, with the surrounding region now including 85 million people. In a recent interview, Jeffrey Sachs explained that Shenzen had become a global leader in many different fields, including technological development, industrial production, financial services, shipping, and higher education, probably being unique among the world’s cities for such diverse success.
