I really hate this untestable argument as if we could go back in time and do A|B test to see which framework would have lifted people out of poverty the fastest.

What?? Then why even discuss anything about anything?

If you're criticizing China's policies, surely the point of that criticism is that you think different policies would have been more effective.

It's also not entirely an untestable counterfactual because we can examine every other political faction that had a reasonable chance of controlling China, and see what their leadership looked like in practice, and make reasonable extrapolations based on that.

• The Nationalists did absolutely nothing to help the rural poor, embezzled foreign aid, and were more preoccupied with hunting down their domestic enemies than repelling the genocidal fascist invaders. Chiang Kai-Shek literally had to be captured by his own bodyguards to be pressured into defending the country. Life expectancy remained completely flat during his rule.

• The fascist, genocidal Japanese invaders weren't a good option for obvious reasons.

• How about having no centralized authority at all? That's what they had during the warlord period, a time of chaos and conflict that left the country vulnerable and did nothing to improve things for anyone.

• Before that, there was the Qing dynasty, an authoritarian monarchy which was so assured of its superiority that they completely failed to adapt to foreign innovations and technologies, out of pride, even when it was clear that those technologies were superior.

• Then you have the various European powers, carving the country up to divy up the resources between each other, while getting half the country addicted to opium.

• And, returning to how things played out historically, we have the one and only faction that had any intention whatsoever of helping the hundreds of millions of starving farmers, which doubled life expectancy within a generation and then adapted to changing conditions and enacted policies which, again, brought 800 million people out of extreme poverty. And the whole reason they won the revolution was because the starving Chinese peasants could tell that they were the only ones who gave two shits about helping them.

Which dicks do we measure and do we start at the balls or just the shaft?

I'm the one trying to avoid this pointless dick-measuring contest between countries with vastly different conditions, despite everyone else trying to draw me into it. I've said repeatedly that I don't know why we're comparing countries. Why don't you ask WoodScientist whose dicks we measure, since he's the one trying to measure dicks?