Ok, so let’s take the grain of truth and actually examine it and see how many lies of obfuscation fall out when we do…
It’s true that many developing countries experienced significant increases in life expectancy during the 20th century. Some of the main reasons this happened was due to global advancements in medicine, public health measures, and improved living standards. It should be noted that the USSR led the way in these, being as focused as it was on such things as using state capacity to improve public health (and this despite the massive losses it incurred while defeating the Nazis and liberating western Europe from them, resulting in the decimation of an entire Soviet generation. But this is another remarkable communist achievement for a different post). Most of what we’re talking about here was before the era of neoliberalism in the west, so capitalist countries weren’t as outright opposed to things like public health at the time, but it was still a distant priority behind profits and domination. Public health tended then, as now, seen as merely a means to the end of capitalist accumulation rather than valued as an end in and of itself. One should look into the USSR’s drive to cure smallpox, and how its eradication would not have been possible had it been left up entirely to the US, but that’s another digression.
The statement from the comment above about how ‘this improvement in Chinese life quality was actually a phenomenon happening all over’ paints with too broad a brush, so ridiculously broad as to cover up all the relevant details and thus reality of the matter which is that there was tremendous variation in progress across the world. While the overall trend of increasing life expectancy is common, the rate and timing of improvement varied significantly between countries. China’s progress was astounding in how rapid and substantial its progress was when compared to other developing nations. And the fact that it happened coinciding with the victory of the PLA, the leadership of the CPC, and their founding of the PRC, should make it obvious why this improvement was suddenly able to happen, and not some fluke coincidence as was laid out by u/isa41. Since it was the country Nigera that was brought up by the know-nothing let’s go ahead and use Nigeria as the example to consider this variation.
Nigeria did indeed see improvements in life expectancy, but its trajectory differs drastically from China’s. Nigeria’s progress was and has been slower and less dramatic, full of “fits and starts.” In the 1960s, for example, Nigeria’s life expectancy was below 50 years. It has improved since then, but as a slow incline and nowhere near as rapidly as China’s, which the graph that @BeamBrain@hexbear.net posted shows. I haven’t gone around to find all other countries life expectancy graphs just to write up this reply, but I would bet that if I challenged someone to find a graph (that isn’t fudged or manipulated obviously) that shows the kind of rapid progress and on such a grand of a scale as China, they would not be able to find one. Well, someone might… if they found one for the USSR, just set back a few decades. Because the only other place where you can find that kind of rapid improvement sustained over that length of time for that many people would be the Soviet Union.
What this liberal ideologue is trying to cover up here is that what is so astounding about this graph is not simply that improvement happened, but the degree of it. The sheer number of people involved and importantly the rate of change (first derivative). The agenda to discredit the jaw-dropping achievement of the CPC in improving the lives of the Chinese people becomes as obvious as it is odious.
The fact of the matter is, the steep incline in China’s life expectancy in the late 1940s and early 1950s was more pronounced than in any other developing countries. This rapid improvement was influenced by specific policies and initiatives implemented by the new government, including widespread public health campaigns and improvements in basic healthcare access, as well as education that included teaching about healthcare.
Also, the statement about Nigeria being “plagued by famines” and following the same trend is completely inaccurate. While Nigeria has faced food security challenges, it hasn’t experienced famines on the scale that China did in its history. To say otherwise is just lying. China’s life expectancy trend did include setbacks, most notably during the Great Famine of 1959-1961, which is not typical of all developing countries, but they were always learned from and corrected for, something you won’t see in countries plagued by capitalist exploitation which tends also to bring things like war and instability.
In short, don’t be fooled by these losers with an agenda who are either sinophobes, anticommunists (which itself can’t be separated from fascism it turns out), or just deeply misled people who simply can’t accept that reality doesn’t conform to their worldview and seek to distort the truth so that it better appears to. Seek to see reality for what it really is. Don’t be a lib trying to wrap the world around your flawed idealist notions. Understand and apply material analysis.
Stop calling readily verifiable historic fact my “narrow vision of events” like a liberal would. It’s pathetic.
As for calling you a liberal, well… “Walks like a duck, quacks like a duck…”
But that’s not lazy, it’s just being honest. When I was an anarchist, I hadn’t studied enough history, yet importantly I didn’t engage in historic revisionism to justify my ideological outlook nor to try to wash away the profound achievements of my leftist comrades. That is something liberals do. Even if you call yourself an anarchist, my assessment of your liberalism was still fair and accurate. If you don’t want to be called a liberal, stop doing the exact thing liberals are known for doing and that actual anarchists do not do.
lol. Yeah, material analysis is “bootlicking excuses.” Friggin’ liberal.