"nothing has actually happened but we are obligated to make it look like things have happened in order to steer more opinions in the direction of that thing happening"

you expressed confusion with my use of the english language and so i have adjusted my communication style to suit your apparent needs. if you feel this somehow reflects poorly on your personal character it is no fault of mine.

the entire point of me linking the time article was to point out that it was cognitive laziness (and likely bad faith) on your part to invoke a third party 'bias checker' (that in all likelihood is itself biased) as some impartial mediator of reality. typically, the next logical step to take here would be to engage with the points of the articles in question and judge their merits through consensus based on verifiable fact, but it seems you got lost somewhere along the way and now you appear to be resisting attempts to shepherd you back on topic.

notice how i didn't prepend that post with a brief summary of rhetorical techniques like i said i would? that's because i didn't use any. ditto this post.

sorry, i thought native english speakers would be more familiar with the concept of hyperbole. i will take the time to write a brief summary of relevant semantic techniques used in subsequent posts to help out the more rhetorically challenged members of our community.

they seem to counter it by saying a western country did the same/worse, which isn't wrong but doesn't address the point?

western countries are typically higher in every respect on the HDI and yet they often have the same/worse problems as a less developed communist country. then people from said western country flock to criticize the communist country for said problems and offer only token acknowledgement of these problems in their own country. when called out on this, they reveal a superficial understanding of how the problem manifests itself in either country and withdraw to rhetorical redoubts of 'criticism is never unhelpful' and 'i also criticize my own country (but i criticize the communist one a lot more)'.

do you see how this might come across as frustrating or hypocritical?

time ran the exact same article, what is your point?

i did this and the guy complained that he couldnt read chinese. cant win with these people

i can't believe i spent like a fucking week going through 'adam smith in beijing' for the third time and then federation happens and it's literally just a deluge of npc quality 'china bad' brainworms. what a waste of time

coming out of the hyperbolic time chamber and it's not even season 1 krillin, it's an endless, neatly arrayed, single file line of yamchas

entity with the time, resources to try to sway public opinion

why would any foreign political entity waste its valuable english proficient resources on astroturfing an online backwater filled with politically illiterate nobodies? peak liberal solipsism

the GLF was economic policy made in response to withdrawal of soviet technological and financial aid during the sino-soviet split, one of the primary motivating factors of which being soviet insistence on china essentially allowing the soviets to recolonize the port of dalian to build a naval base from which to deploy its pacific fleet.

on top of being under sanctions from the west, the sino-soviet split further deprived china of markets with which to support its all-important capital intensive industries and so china was forced to resort to agricultural export as a method of making up the shortfall. collectivization was also pursued simultaneously to pool domestic capital for internal consumption, but due to various geographical, technical and political considerations, internal consumption was not sufficiently stimulated to support manufacturing, and so agricultural export became the primary way to finance china's continued industrialization. most accounts that are not hysterically anti-communist (including liberal darling amartya sen) of the period around the 1958 famine have records of aggregate production being more than sufficient to sustain the overall population, with the primary points of failure being overzealous local governments in highly productive areas, as opposed to popular western conceptions of overbearing central government mandated directives.

all this to say that hitler and the holocaust's relevance as a point of comparison to mao and the GLF as anything beyond 'people died when he was in charge' is laughably superficial and mostly only functions as a thought terminating associative fallacy for juicing your dopamine receptors in order to immunize your brain against more correct opinions.

i am sure the success or failure of those domestic policies were not in the least contingent on international political conditions. the economic policies of an island that imports 97% of its energy with a food self sufficiency rate of around 30% and exports accounting for 70% of gdp can in no way be considered to be overexposed or at risk to trade fluctuations and even if that were the case, i am sure that foreign policy would not play an outsize role in determining the magnitude or periodicity of said trade fluctuations.

Because the people were disappointed in what DPP had done with the economy

inciting conflict with your biggest trading partner does tend to have negative effects on the economy