Communism impoverished and starved China. Free trade rescued it

While reiterating his defense of Fidel Castro’s reign of terror over Cuba, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders decided to bolster not just another dictatorship, but perhaps the world’s top human rights violator and certainly the most significant threat to the United States.

Bear in mind, China’s regime tortures its own citizens, censors them, and keeps information from them by blocking the internet on a mass scale. It is cordoning millions of Muslims and other minorities in concentration camps. The tip of the iceberg, the part we all saw, was the brutal suppression of a very popular anti-Beijing freedom movement in Hong Kong. For Sanders to offer such praise to the Chinese regime and to credit it with what China’s people accomplished when it got out of the way is economic illiteracy at best and willful sycophancy to a dictatorship at worst.

Sanders is simply serving as a mouthpiece for the Chinese Communist Party’s lies about China’s recent economic success. In reality, China is far behind where it should be and could be, as Hong Kong’s and Taiwan’s relative success demonstrates.

Mao Zedong’s regime took over relatively late in the process of leading China out of feudalism. Unfortunately, he would lead it backward to new levels of poverty, misery, and starvation. Through the collectivization of agriculture and the Great Leap Forward, the Chinese Communist Party created the Great Chinese Famine, which killed some 45 million to 55 million Chinese people in just four years.

To add insult to injury, the regime that had already caused so much death through stupid ideology and official incompetence continued to oppress and murder all perceived political enemies, as when the more overtly radical Cultural Revolution killed another 20 million Chinese and further destroyed China’s economy. This wave of repression, which lasted until 1976 and ended only with Mao’s death, led directly to the chronic malnutrition of 200 million people and the flatlining of China’s economic growth at a time when the U.S. economy continued to grow with little disruption.

By 1978, 9 out of 10 Chinese people were living below the global extreme poverty line or on less than $2 per day. But that has since changed.

Today, less than 1% of Chinese citizens live on less than $2 per day. But that’s not thanks to socialism. That’s because China’s dictatorship finally opened their country up to ideas such as private ownership and free trade. They lifted some onerous price controls and regulations, allowing private enterprise to explode.

Every cent added to China’s gross domestic product since 1978 can be attributed to its economic liberalization, the very opposite of the authoritarianism that Sanders is praising. It’s undoubtedly a good thing that capitalist reforms allowed a billion Chinese to pull themselves out of poverty, even if the rapid creation of new wealth has made China one of the most unequal nations as a matter of income distribution, with a Gini coefficient nearly double that of Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development countries.

So yes, China’s recent economic recovery is an unequivocal human rights success. But it came in spite of, not because of socialist economic ideas. China’s Communist past has hindered it, as is illustrated by the great success and growth of its liberal neighbors: South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, and yes, Hong Kong.

The story of China was a predictable one. Economics tend to follow the same rules throughout human history. Capitalism creates wealth and kills poverty; communism does the reverse. At the young age of 78, Sanders still doesn’t see it.