I liked a comment by Sarah C. Paine, about how Communism is a really great system for taking power from within a state (think Mao), and then staying in power, but it's horrible for generating prosperity. When evaluating the choices of certain people, it's clarifying to not think in terms of prosperity, but, rather, power. I think there's a case to be made about Trump seeing advantage in making enemies of his political rivals' allies, and then there's that whole weird situation about making Russia-favoring decisions, who knows why.
Isnt it objectively true that China is the only country to lift 500m people from poverty? The debate is whether the power to do that needs to come from a single party so powerful it can starve 50m without repercussion.
Yeah, The Economist regularly writes these articles that spend half the time praising the intense competition in certain sectors of the economy and half the time bemoaning the influence of state-owned enterprises (or other CCP instruments) in others. It seems to vary a lot by specific industry.
In my mind, Communism as exhibited by modern China is more defined by the dictatorship style, than the economy style, not that economy is independent of it. So, I'd consider the chinese communism vs western democracy a more enlightnening contrast.
