Thanks!!
I don’t doubt it and I believe ya, I just wanted more info. I’m not a fan of market reforms in the ideal, but I can, to an extent, understand their historical necessity for China & Vietnam.
addendum:
These estimates indicate that from 1981 to 1990, when most of China’s socialist provisioning systems were still in place, the country’s extreme poverty rate was on average only 5.6 per cent.
Moreover, extreme poverty in China increased during the capitalist reforms of the 1990s, reaching a peak of 68 per cent, as privatisation inflated the prices of essential goods and thus deflated the incomes of the working classes.
Can’t really fault people for thinking the PRC really did take the “capitalist road”, holy shit. If it weren’t for their major successes as of recent, I’d still think the same.
Vietnam’s situation is further complicated by IMF involvement. What you highlighted is why I generally think that the “economic miracle” aside from being crass liberal myth-making, solved a problem that it itself created because the privatization reforms multiplied poverty roughly 15 times before bringing it back down over the course of a few decades, but many people never saw the other side of that change because they died in squalor.
I don’t mean that to go Maoist, I think that something at least similar to what Deng did was probably necessary to prevent China being destroyed by capitalist encirclement, but there is the danger in the long term that it saved the revolution from murder only by having it commit suicide.
