Comment by impish9208
23 days ago
Fun fact: Zambia’s GDP per capita was greater than China’s in 1975. So there’s a parallel universe where a human rights conference in China gets cancelled because of Zambian influence.
23 days ago
Fun fact: Zambia’s GDP per capita was greater than China’s in 1975. So there’s a parallel universe where a human rights conference in China gets cancelled because of Zambian influence.
I don't think there's a reasonable possible world where whatever government controls the land area of Zambia overtakes whatever government controls the land area of China in the long term, regardless of what the GDP per capita metrics specifically looked like in 1975. The discrepancies that make Chinese civilization more prone to being globally-influential than central African civilization (like "rice agriculture") are at least thousands of years old.
That's true but a bit misleading. In 1975 China had a vast population and was at the tail end of decades of Maoist mismanagement, so the per capita income was very low. Zambia OTOH was still in the ten-year honeymoon period after independence where established institutions mostly functioned and the country had enormous mineral wealth, so things ran OK for awhile even under UNIP one-party rule... and then went downhill rapidly. Graphs of per capita GDP for the two countries would look something like an X, Zambia being the line going down, China being the one going up.