How do you respond to this statement: The success of China is proof that Communism works.

They have sweat shops of children making our clothes and shite for pennies an hour

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How do you respond to this statement: The success of China is proof that Communism works

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Success is a relative term

and

China didn't start "working" until the market based reforms.

In other words, they aren't communist anymore

A success except for its people that are basically forced labor or rural poor.

What it does suggest is that capitalism isn't inherently linked to democracy and freer forms of government as Western Liberalism had believed from the Enlightenment onward. We will see if China will liberalize it's political structure in the next few decades.

Just Do It.

Guess you could say it works well for the govt, not so much for the people.

Chinese started to see progress when they started allowing private ownership of industry.

Their success didn't take off until they employed free market principles?

China is not communist. Government owns the land, but that’s about it. Government owns oil companies, just like most of the world. Other than that, it’s at most an oligarchy.

As soon as Deng opened the little experiment in Shenzhen, it was all over for the idea of a command economy.

They can call themselves communist, but they are not. Leaders are not elected like ours, but they are a mixture of party apparatchiks and highly successful people recruited into government. That’s a political paradigm, though. Not an economic one.

All in all, there is an argument to be made that they are a more effective government than ours. We can preen and say our leadership is freely elected all we want, and there is some truth to that, but don’t think for a second that corruption here is less cancerous than the abuses that occur there. We can spout off freely, and there is value in that. When push comes to shove, though, most of our pontificating is tilting at windmills.

I’ve been there more times than I can count. Those are some enterprising MF-ers. Soviet Union had nothing like that.