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Important to caveat, large cohorts of China got relatively rich... there's still 100s of millions predominantly old who got left behind by modernization. Because countries with pop size of PRC (and India) can specialize in EVERY sector category and still not have enough opportunities to uplift everyone. Where PRC dodged bullet is family planning, i.e. averting 100s of millions of births, but that's 100s of millions additional poor averted, and because poor bias overwhelmingly old and un/der educated, they will die and PRC per capita will converge towards urban high income, i.e. PRC entering high income is mechanically/mathematically determined. Obviously demographics may be issue later, but PRC figured out how to be rich, even if slightly after being old. India (who also tried family planning) utterly fucked in this regard, i.e. trending towards 1.8B people, ignoring all the things PRC did that India didn't. PRC 1.4b trending towards 400m old/poor vs 1000m young/rich. Indian trending towards 1400m old/young poor, 400m young/rich. Can't craw out of per capital poverty with that composition, not within this century, and also very different configuration of constituents to govern, i.e. volatility is going to go way up when more than half of country is young and poor... worse if young educated and poor. As for why. Democracy sucks at development. Not a single >10m country has gone from developing to reasonably developed on democratic system. The few <10m countries basically have some resource or geopolitical favourable position where narrow specialization or limited sponsorship from hegemon = enough $$$ to uplift per capita. Political economy is as soft as and inexact as science can be, but democracy being the worst form of gov for developing countries (not except all others) is overwhelmingly clear. If you're a poor country, hope you have competent authoritarian leadership, bandwagon with hegemons (or rather do not trigger ire of hegemons) or do not get on bad side of hegemon, do some land reforms, sort out your problematic minorities, break eggs before they become problems. It will be bloody but it may pay off, alternative is generations trapped in poverty that accumulates more averted deaths than if you just slapped country into shape in the first place. Don't fall for democratic promotion = aka political elite capture, that will also happen under incompetent autocrats but will 100% happen in democratic system. |