They’re saying that (I think) the life expectation rise after the PRC was established is just coincidental with a global trend of life expectancies rising and that communism had no role in improving life expectancy.
Then my response is that it’s very odd that the KMT wasn’t able to emulate that “coincidental” rise in life expectancy when they were in power and it had already started increasing in other countries.
And as for communism playing a role, let me use an analogy. Recently there was a story where an Eritrean immigrant, Ebro Ahmed, saved a runaway bus full of children by jumping into it and hitting the brakes. He told the news that it was his Muslim faith that inspired him to jump into the bus. That guy is obviously a hero for what he did. But that doesn’t mean that only an Eritean, only an immigrant, or only a Muslim, could have done what he did in that situation.
Any sort of person who believed any sort of thing could have, if they so desired and were in a position to do so, instituted land reform which overall greatly increased food security, and anyone could have trained up a bunch of doctors and sent them out to the countryside to vaccinate hundreds of millions of people and provide access to modern medicine for the first time in history. And anyone who had done those things in China would have seen the same increase in life expectancy. And, had someone else done so, they might well have avoided blunders like the Great Leap Forward.
Unfortunately, nobody else did. The Qing dynasty did nothing to help the peasants. The Western colonizers did nothing to help the peasants. The warlords did nothing to help the peasants. The KMT did nothing to help the peasants. The Japanese did nothing to help the peasants. Every political faction that had actually existed in China was perfectly willing to just stand there and let the bus full of children roll on by, except for the communists.
In other countries, that wasn’t the case. As their graph shows, in, say, Sweden, there were people who were not communists who took actions that helped the people and raised life expectancy. Communists do not, in fact, have a monopoly on implementing policies that help people or raise life expectancy. Being led by communists does not somehow magically create better living conditions. It does so when communists implement good policies that raise living conditions. And if they’re led by someone who’s not a communist but implements the same policies, then it will produce the same effects.
Honestly, when I saw that out loud, it’s so obvious that it’s crazy I have to say it in the first place. It feels as though my actual position of, “Mao helped raise the life expectancy of the Chinese people,” has been bizarrely twisted and misinterpreted into “COMMUNISM #1! EVERYONE ELSE SUCKS! MAO IS THE ONLY PERSON WHO DID ANYTHING GOOD EVAH!1!!” No doubt, this sort of automatic twisting of beliefs is where the whole accusation of “tankie” comes from, because anyone who has a single good thing to say about Mao is automatically assumed to be “stanning” or “simping” him, or whatever silly word they’re using this week, and assigned all sorts of positions regardless of what they actually said.
They’re saying that (I think) the life expectation rise after the PRC was established is just coincidental with a global trend of life expectancies rising and that communism had no role in improving life expectancy.
Then my response is that it’s very odd that the KMT wasn’t able to emulate that “coincidental” rise in life expectancy when they were in power and it had already started increasing in other countries.
And as for communism playing a role, let me use an analogy. Recently there was a story where an Eritrean immigrant, Ebro Ahmed, saved a runaway bus full of children by jumping into it and hitting the brakes. He told the news that it was his Muslim faith that inspired him to jump into the bus. That guy is obviously a hero for what he did. But that doesn’t mean that only an Eritean, only an immigrant, or only a Muslim, could have done what he did in that situation.
Any sort of person who believed any sort of thing could have, if they so desired and were in a position to do so, instituted land reform which overall greatly increased food security, and anyone could have trained up a bunch of doctors and sent them out to the countryside to vaccinate hundreds of millions of people and provide access to modern medicine for the first time in history. And anyone who had done those things in China would have seen the same increase in life expectancy. And, had someone else done so, they might well have avoided blunders like the Great Leap Forward.
Unfortunately, nobody else did. The Qing dynasty did nothing to help the peasants. The Western colonizers did nothing to help the peasants. The warlords did nothing to help the peasants. The KMT did nothing to help the peasants. The Japanese did nothing to help the peasants. Every political faction that had actually existed in China was perfectly willing to just stand there and let the bus full of children roll on by, except for the communists.
In other countries, that wasn’t the case. As their graph shows, in, say, Sweden, there were people who were not communists who took actions that helped the people and raised life expectancy. Communists do not, in fact, have a monopoly on implementing policies that help people or raise life expectancy. Being led by communists does not somehow magically create better living conditions. It does so when communists implement good policies that raise living conditions. And if they’re led by someone who’s not a communist but implements the same policies, then it will produce the same effects.
Honestly, when I saw that out loud, it’s so obvious that it’s crazy I have to say it in the first place. It feels as though my actual position of, “Mao helped raise the life expectancy of the Chinese people,” has been bizarrely twisted and misinterpreted into “COMMUNISM #1! EVERYONE ELSE SUCKS! MAO IS THE ONLY PERSON WHO DID ANYTHING GOOD EVAH!1!!” No doubt, this sort of automatic twisting of beliefs is where the whole accusation of “tankie” comes from, because anyone who has a single good thing to say about Mao is automatically assumed to be “stanning” or “simping” him, or whatever silly word they’re using this week, and assigned all sorts of positions regardless of what they actually said.