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Comment by maxglute

17 days ago

This so historically stupid claim, it's not even wrong tier.

There was no GDP data under KMT - it wasn't even formally calculated.

CCP started GDP calculations, but using soviet MPS GDP accounting system that basically omitted services and lowballed production prices.

The only GDP data we have that is pseudo normalized are via estimates like Maddison project. Even they don't bother to recompose China/KMT data during WW2. The TLDR is prewar peak 1939 data (right before JP invasion) around 288B, PRC took over in 1949, GDP was 245B in 1950, grew to 306B by 1952. GLF tanked GDP from 460b to 350B... i.e. the worst case scenario of GLF floor was still 40% larger than 1950.

E: Note wiki data links to ourworldindata that pulls from Maddison and in table form KMT/WW2 data is not available and only pulling from closest data point 1938/1950 and naively extrapolating per capita. Because KMT data doesn't exist.

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maxglute

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Retric  17 days ago

GDP isn’t just some arbitrary abstraction it’s the amount of goods and services produced by an economy.

At the low end of economic output starvation or the lack thereof is a strong indication of GDP. You do need to adjust for exports and imports but you don’t need to have a particularly deep insight into the economy beyond that.

  • maxglute  17 days ago

    Of course GDP is an arbitrary abstraction, it's literally derived from arbitrary systems of measurement, i.e. why soviet had mps system and west had sna, and each get to decide what to value and how much... arbitrarily... and even when they calculate, a lot of it is guestimate because no one has perfect or even good data, especially 80 years ago in developing countries.

    > starvation or the lack thereof is a strong indication of GDP

    No that's just an indicator that some cohort starved due to distribution failure. And to be blunt... that cohort was rural / peasants doing mostly subsistence agriculture tier production that do not count much towards GDP. An urban worker in industry can generate 10x GDP surplus than farmers in a commune.

    Hence starvation (mostly in rural) has disproportionately less GDP weight vs urban worker productivity. An economy losing millions of peasants while still modernizing/industrializing can easily maintain higher total GDP than peaceful agrarian society. AKA CCP speed running first 5 year plan post WW2 raised the GDP floor so much that they can unalive 10s of millions of peasants and still have higher GDP vs pre/post war which, was incidentally also not peaceful agrarian society, but even messier interregnum shitshow with significantly shit state capacity than relatively unified postwar PRC under CCP. Republican Era KMT (during anarchy/civil war) simply couldn't organize fragmented China to be as productive as PRC under CCP, who can lose millions of peasants with marginal productivity of labour near zero and still do massively better in gdp/economic terms.

    • Retric  17 days ago

      Between 1954 and 1959, China supplied 160,000 tons of tungsten ore, 110,000 tons of copper, 30,000 tons of antimony, and 90,000 tons of rubber to the Soviet Union. That’s how they repaid a loan not through industrial production because their economy wasn’t producing significant high value output from raw materials, they couldn’t even smelt ore efficiently.

      Re-education camps don’t generate value. They didn’t have a surplus of urban workers instead Mow just destroyed the economy. Killing off the educated doctors etc isn’t a free action, it has negative consequences.

      China literally had net migration out of cities, so no this wasn’t over investment in industry or a distribution issue this was just abject failure and total economic collapse. Total Anarchy would have been better for the economy than Mao.

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