this post was submitted on 16 Mar 2025
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I think that many communists unfortunately (not purposefully or maliciously, though) gloss over or forget how fucking terrible and "evil" and grotesque and risky alot of aspects of the Reform and Opening Up process were.
I used to hate and demonize Deng Xiaoping, and I feel incredibly guilty for that, even though he has been dead for a long time. This is back when I was a relatively new communist and bought into alot of the CIA propaganda about China.
Yet, it bears consideration just how close the Reform and Opening up strategy came to mismanagement and possible failure, at times.
I can only imagine how horrible it was for Chinese peasant's entire Iron Rice Bowl structure to have been dismantled virtually overnight, and have almost no finances, social safety net, greatly stripped labor protections and rights. And there are still alot of unfortunate layovers and side effects from the Reform and Opening up policy that still haven't been ironed out. Like the fact that despite state and socialist-minded support, the overall Healthcare system still fundamentally operates on a profit motive, just wayyyy less exploitative and expensive and price-gouging as in capitalist countries. Or how even though absolute poverty has been eradicated, there are still lots of poor people, higher education can still be very expensive, labor protections could be better in general.
I'm not sure how true this is, but I've read/heard that in regards to poor people, that in some contexts, there are more poorer people in China now than during the Mao era, albeit less people overall in absolute/heart-wrenching poverty. Though it also seems like it is easier for poorer people to better their standard of living.
I'm extremely glad that things are definitely on the up and up, though. And I truly think that China's best times haven't even started yet.
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.
Maybe i shouldn't have made that offhand comment about his predecessor because now i risk exposing a gap in my knowledge, haha...
What i meant was, as far as i know, and i admit my knowledge on this subject is not the best, but i've heard that the turn toward addressing the most glaring problems such as corruption and inequality that were caused by the economic reforms in fact began already in the later part of Hu Jintao's term.
I just wanted to make it clear that it is not solely a Xi Jinping achievement, it was clearly something that the CPC as a whole understood needed to happen.
I'm 99 percent sure you didn't mean it in the sense that Xi Jinping is solely responsible for China's success, and yes, I can see that Jintao seemed to crack down on excessive capitalist elements.