Huawei 5G kit must be removed from UK by 2027

Percentagewise, China hasn't done any better than South Korea or Taiwan at lifting their populace out of poverty. So I don't see how that comes anywhere close to excusing China's human rights abuses. And while SK and Taiwan only became democracies relatively recently, their human rights abuses even before then pale in comparison to what China is currently doing to Uighurs, Tibetans, and religious minorities in general. So yes, if anything improper is putting things too lightly.

I think you're understating the human rights impact of going from third world to first world living standards. You like having your teeth?

No, I'm saying that similar countries were able to lift their populations out of poverty without creating concentration camps for millions of political dissidents and religious minorities in the process. China's economic success isn't tied to its authoritarian regime, and it's actually pretty easy to argue that they would have lifted even more of their population out of poverty even faster if they hadn't had harebrained/genocidal schemes like the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, and communism in general. China didn't begin to see any significant economic success until after they abandoned most of their communist policies and began liberalizing markets in the late 80's and early 90's.

Lifting 100 millions people out of poverty is totally different from lifting 1 millions people out of poverty. Moving a car involves much more engineering than moving a carpet.

If they haven't done great leap forward and cultural revolution it would be better, that is true. But by "abandoning all communist policies and began liberalizing markets", not all countries see economic success, ukraine, iraq and all recent "liberated" countries, and russian living quality in 90s was even worse than their late 80s.

And ironically enough, the fast developing era of taiwan, south korea, by today's standard, are not under any form of democracy.

I lifted myself out of poverty. You canmt exactly compare myself (population of 1) with the efforts to move a country of over 1 billion people out of poverty. It's not as if I have somehow figured this out and can scale this up to 1 billion people.

> And ironically enough, the fast developing era of taiwan, south korea, by today's standard, are not under any form of democracy.

This is I think an under-appreciated point... Taiwan and SK both made the most economic gains under military dictatorships. Social liberalization followed economic growth.

Something similar might have happened in Singapore, they're technically a democracy but have been governed by the PAP forever and don't really subscribe to freedom of press in the way the US does (but have their own ways of building accountability).

All very fascinating stuff. 10 years ago I would have said that China would follow the same path but in that case social liberalization still hasn't come yet. Certainly the GDP per capita has not yet caught up but the PPP was pretty close last I checked.

Surely this is a joke right? The white terror in Taiwan on a per capita basis was more brutal than anything in China. People were summarily executed, jailed, and robbed for even the slightest hints of anti-establishment sympathies.

From the numbers I can find from a cursory search, the upper estimates for deaths caused by the White Terror is ~32,000 (28k from the massacre that kicked it off plus 4,000 executed in camps). That's about .35% of Taiwan's then population of ~9 million.

By contrast, the Great Leap Forward alone killed 16 million, and that's at the lower end of estimates. The population of China at the end of this was ~665 million, meaning they killed 2.7% of their population just in the Great Leap Forward.

So even with the numbers most favorable to China and least favorable to Taiwan, Taiwan comes out ahead by an order of magnitude.

But you hadn't even heard of that. Or the gwangju massacre in korea. Right?

Why is that? How come some things are marketed extensively to the American public but others are never mentioned?

(Also, if the goal is to criticize maoist China, I'd go with the cultural revolution instead of the great leap forward)

I had, in fact, heard of the White Terror, and the suppression of the island's indiginous people. I had not heard of the Gwangju Massacre.

There are two reasons why they aren't mentioned as much as Mao's atrocities. One is that those countries are our allies, and as a result we are more willing to overlook their faults. And I don't think that's necessarily right, but it's part of human nature to overlook the faults and flaws of friends and allies. But the second reason is that, even ignoring those effects, Mao killed far more of his citizens (and far more per capita), making it a much more interesting and disturbing event in history. The atrocities of Taiwan and South Korea come across as "run of the mill authoritarian leaders violently cracking down on dissent" while the atrocities of Mao's China are on a whole different level.

FWIW, as far as dictators and genociders go I think Pol Pot gets the least attention relative to the scale of his atrocities since he wiped out 25% of the population, and in extremely brutal and arbitrary ways.

The cultural revolution is interesting. Yet another famine exacerbated by govt screwups is a lot less so.

Like you said, it's all about which side people are on. And I agree on pol pot. The only self-genocide I'm aware of in the record.

It's a little bit disingenuous to compare the White Terror to the Great Leap Forward, no? As per your original post, we are comparing the brutality and political suppression of the respective regimes, not their governing abilities.