[hyruo]

The easiest issue to explain is the Taiwan question. In 1949, Taiwan stripped China of all its gold reserves and its entire elite class, leaving the Chinese mainland with nothing but a shambles. Furthermore, following the Korean War in 1950, the United States backed Taiwan in imposing a comprehensive blockade on China's coastline; this plunged China into a state of total hostility with the U.S.and, by extension, with the entire Western bloc. By the later stages of the Cold War, this situation had become even more dire: Khrushchev threatened to launch a "surgical" nuclear strike against China, while Eisenhower devised a strike plan involving 870 nuclear warheads. Here was an agrarian nation facing simultaneous nuclear threats from two major superpowers; under such circumstances, any discussion of economic development was nothing short of a luxury.

[wqaatwt]

Economic growth in Taiwan only began accelerating when it began transitioning from a brutal dictatorship to a democracy. Something like applies to China, of course liberalization there was primarily economic and only political to a much lesser extent.

> any discussion of economic development

That’s not true at all though. They attempted some grandiose programs. It’s just that there are hardly any words to describe how absurdly incompetent Mao and his ilk where. So they just failed outright until they began liberalizing the economy in a controlled way.