What did poverty mean in both pre and post-reform and opening up china (and elsewhere)
I asked this question a long, long time ago on reddit, but now I cant find it and also we've all matured and learned a lot since then, so id like to ask the question again.
I was also inspired to make this post after seeing an anarchist whine about socialist states teaching people how to read, saying "they keep in place the systems that make illiteracy a bad thing." I obviously am not taking them seriously, but it did get me thinking.
Anyway, what i mean by the question is that poverty in non-socialist countries is dehabilitating, causes people to get diseased, both physically and mentally. It's also extremely isolating and usually requires people work harder to actually remain alive.
But would this be the same in a socialist country? When people in pre-reform china were impoverished, what was their standard of living like compared to people making a similar income elsewhere? Yes technically they didn't make that much money a day, but did they need money to have a home or food? If they were impoverished was it possible to get a job? What would the likely-hood of drug addiction be compared to impoverished people elsewhere. And how consistent did this remain throughout the reform period to today (obviously extreme poverty has been mostly eliminated in China today, but still).
This isn't to say, in any case, reform and opening up was a bad policy. Even if the poor were somewhat happy, they (and china) were still poor, and the improvement in living standards from reform and opening up outweighs any theoretical and/or moralistic gain from poverty. However I am just curious. (This also goes for other countries like the DPRK to)
cfgaussian - 3mon
When people in pre-reform china were impoverished, what was their standard of living like compared to people making a similar income elsewhere? Yes technically they didn't make that much money a day, but did they need money to have a home or food? If they were impoverished was it possible to get a job? What would the likely-hood of drug addiction be compared to impoverished people elsewhere. And how consistent did this remain throughout the reform period to today (obviously extreme poverty has been mostly eliminated in China today, but still).
I think the conceptual problem you are having here is imagining poverty as it exists in developed and urbanized countries. The problem that China had was that even after the revolution it was still a very rural society. It's not a question of money, it's about living standards. Did they have access to infrastructure like clean water, heating, electricity? Did they have liveable housing? Did they have food security? For the most part the answer was still no. "Jobs" as such were a thing that you only really had in cities. In the rural areas we are talking about subsistence farming.
Yes, things greatly improved after the revolution, but many of those improvements frequently didn't reach much of the countryside. People there still lived in very poor conditions. The most radical changes came about due to things like land redistribution which freed up people from serf-like conditions of tenant farming where a majority of what little they could produce went to the landlord. Also, access to education was greatly expanded, and to some degree healthcare, though it was still woefully insufficient in the most remote rural areas. Getting to cities was very difficult due to lack of roads, and many people were quite isolated.
The question of drug addiction is an interesting one because of China's history with this. Obviously there was a lot of that during the century of humiliation after the British forced China to open up its ports to British opium imports. Since then every Chinese government, not just the communists but the nationalists before them too, has viewed this as a very sensitive subject and has been very harsh on drugs.
However it is important to bear in mind that this is a problem that primarily affected the coastal areas that have access to international trade. If you went far enough inland it would be difficult to even come by anything that you could not grow locally. Organized crime still emanated out of places like Hong Kong and Shanghai due to their international trade connections and the urban poverty milieu that created these networks, but they probably didn't reach too deep into the countryside.
As for what happened after Reform and Opening Up, we have to be clear eyed about this, it was not pretty. The reforms came with a lot of downsides and although the country's wealth nominally rose, the poverty problem got worse before it got better. The reversal of the previous collectivizations in agriculture, the scaling back of social safety nets and social guarantees that would mean people could still live decent lives even without much money, opening the floodgates to corruption...
That was a difficult period and the 1989 protests were also partly motivated by this new insecurity that people suddenly found themselves in. A big population shift from the countryside to the cities took place which brought with it a whole different set of challenges.
King_Simp in genzhou
What did poverty mean in both pre and post-reform and opening up china (and elsewhere)
I asked this question a long, long time ago on reddit, but now I cant find it and also we've all matured and learned a lot since then, so id like to ask the question again.
I was also inspired to make this post after seeing an anarchist whine about socialist states teaching people how to read, saying "they keep in place the systems that make illiteracy a bad thing." I obviously am not taking them seriously, but it did get me thinking.
Anyway, what i mean by the question is that poverty in non-socialist countries is dehabilitating, causes people to get diseased, both physically and mentally. It's also extremely isolating and usually requires people work harder to actually remain alive.
But would this be the same in a socialist country? When people in pre-reform china were impoverished, what was their standard of living like compared to people making a similar income elsewhere? Yes technically they didn't make that much money a day, but did they need money to have a home or food? If they were impoverished was it possible to get a job? What would the likely-hood of drug addiction be compared to impoverished people elsewhere. And how consistent did this remain throughout the reform period to today (obviously extreme poverty has been mostly eliminated in China today, but still).
This isn't to say, in any case, reform and opening up was a bad policy. Even if the poor were somewhat happy, they (and china) were still poor, and the improvement in living standards from reform and opening up outweighs any theoretical and/or moralistic gain from poverty. However I am just curious. (This also goes for other countries like the DPRK to)
I think the conceptual problem you are having here is imagining poverty as it exists in developed and urbanized countries. The problem that China had was that even after the revolution it was still a very rural society. It's not a question of money, it's about living standards. Did they have access to infrastructure like clean water, heating, electricity? Did they have liveable housing? Did they have food security? For the most part the answer was still no. "Jobs" as such were a thing that you only really had in cities. In the rural areas we are talking about subsistence farming.
Yes, things greatly improved after the revolution, but many of those improvements frequently didn't reach much of the countryside. People there still lived in very poor conditions. The most radical changes came about due to things like land redistribution which freed up people from serf-like conditions of tenant farming where a majority of what little they could produce went to the landlord. Also, access to education was greatly expanded, and to some degree healthcare, though it was still woefully insufficient in the most remote rural areas. Getting to cities was very difficult due to lack of roads, and many people were quite isolated.
The question of drug addiction is an interesting one because of China's history with this. Obviously there was a lot of that during the century of humiliation after the British forced China to open up its ports to British opium imports. Since then every Chinese government, not just the communists but the nationalists before them too, has viewed this as a very sensitive subject and has been very harsh on drugs.
However it is important to bear in mind that this is a problem that primarily affected the coastal areas that have access to international trade. If you went far enough inland it would be difficult to even come by anything that you could not grow locally. Organized crime still emanated out of places like Hong Kong and Shanghai due to their international trade connections and the urban poverty milieu that created these networks, but they probably didn't reach too deep into the countryside.
As for what happened after Reform and Opening Up, we have to be clear eyed about this, it was not pretty. The reforms came with a lot of downsides and although the country's wealth nominally rose, the poverty problem got worse before it got better. The reversal of the previous collectivizations in agriculture, the scaling back of social safety nets and social guarantees that would mean people could still live decent lives even without much money, opening the floodgates to corruption...
That was a difficult period and the 1989 protests were also partly motivated by this new insecurity that people suddenly found themselves in. A big population shift from the countryside to the cities took place which brought with it a whole different set of challenges.