[hollerith]

It is not true that China increased the standard of living of its people despite sanctions: they did it because the US removed the sanctions: restrictions on trade started to loosen in 1972 (after Nixon's famous trip to China). By 2000, China enjoyed what Washington calls "most favored nation" status, and its only been in the last 7 years or so that Washington has started to restrict Chinese trade again.

[zrn900]

I didnt specifically mean China in my argument, however it still stands:

China raised the standard of living of its people despite not only actual sanctions but even an actual grain blockade that was effected on them by the US via the UN, designed to starve them in the 1950s. The life standards rose in that decade too, not only after the 80s, and the US has nothing to do with it.

This is without saying that being able to trade with outside does not mean that the life standards of the people in a country will rise: The majority of the value from that trade would go to the minority capitalists in a capitalist country and a small percentage of white collars who do their bidding to run the companies owned by those, while the rest majority in the country can be living in knee-deep sh*t. We are seeing this today in various, formerly-prosperous countries even, including the US where a tiny minority takes the boon while the majority has to juggle multiple jobs to afford rent and food.

[hollerith]

China had mostly extremely poor people still in 1972. And they killed millions of their own people in the late 1950s and 1960s in the Great Leap Forward (15–55 million dead, says Wikipedia) and the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution ("Estimates vary from hundreds of thousands to millions," says Wikipedia).

I don't wish to continue to converse with someone as resistant to information as you are.