Originally Posted by
zhaoyun
China didn't have an advantage over India. There you go again, trying to knock down any credit for Chinese people.
First of all, India would not be a united country without Britain. Maybe Northern India would be united because of the Mughals, but India as a nation state is largely a British creation.
Secondly, India as a colony was in relative peace compared to the chaos and destruction China suffered from repeated foreign invasions, not to mention the brutal Japanese occupation and massacres, of course, you're going to deny they ever occurred, even though to do that, you have to deny the Bataan death march too. But I'm sure you will worm your way to somehow justify the denial of the Nanking massacre and Japanese brutality in China, while claiming the stories of their brutality was valid for the rest of Asia.
After independence, India had a government that had some socialist policies which slowed growth but by and large India was relatively stable compared to Communist China under Mao, who plunged China into several disasters including the Great Leap Forward where people starved to death to the Cultural Revolution where society was turned upside down. During this time, China missed three decades of growth and was in complete chaos.
In 1978, Deng Xiaoping started to reform China, slowly at first, then reforms accelerated in the 90s. In 1980, it was China that was coming from behind as it was in war and chaos for nearly a century, while India largely existed peacefully.
If China under Mao had undertaken the same policies that Deng pioneered from the get go in 1949, China would be as developed as Japan today. It's been making up for lost time. What has happened since 1980 is nothing short of a miracle, but of course, you would never acknowledge that.
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