Estonian SSR was probably slightly better by living standards than Russia, in 1990 as well.
Ukrainian GDP per capita was similar with Russia, Baltic States or Poland back then, but now it's 3-4 times less.
General News Regarding China & Hong Kong
- Thread starter Commodore
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Ukrainian GDP per capita was similar with Russia, Baltic States or Poland back then, but now it's 3-4 times less.
Socrates99
Bottoms up!
Per capita GDP is a poor measure of how well avg citizens do. Especially in kleptocracies like the US and Russia. The wealth gaps make GDP a nearly useless number for measuring the health of an economy. I'd be more interested in median income and poverty levels.
Still, from what I've read, I'm not sure Soviets were better off than modern Russians. Yekeem and Red Elk are of course better witnesses than I am. The US and its allies locked the USSR out of trade with the richest parts of the world. Without trade an economy suffers no matter what system you live under. I know China isn't in the exact same system as the USSR but its rise does make me question the narrative that the system itself is what failed.
Western Capitalists managed to undermine the USSR but they've fed China pretty well.
Still, from what I've read, I'm not sure Soviets were better off than modern Russians. Yekeem and Red Elk are of course better witnesses than I am. The US and its allies locked the USSR out of trade with the richest parts of the world. Without trade an economy suffers no matter what system you live under. I know China isn't in the exact same system as the USSR but its rise does make me question the narrative that the system itself is what failed.
Western Capitalists managed to undermine the USSR but they've fed China pretty well.
Lexicus
Deity
There is no serious question that living standards plummeted when the USSR collapsed. Order in fact very nearly collapsed as well, which actually explains Putin's rule more than anything else.
Putin is running a full-on kleptocracy, there is no question about it, but the foundations for that kleptocracy were laid by the neoliberal "shock doctrine" applied to the former Soviet states after the collapse of the USSR. The overnight privatization of the country overseen by naive Westerners who believed "the freer the market, the freer the people" was devastating and the conditions it created were what caused people to see Putin as a savior.
hobbsyoyo
Deity
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Standard of living was on a serious downward trend before the collapse. Life expectancy fell in the Soviet union through the late 70's and 80's while it was rising everywhere else. Stores were empty of products and produce long before the iron curtain fell.
Soviets of the generation prior did have rising standards of living but that stalled out.
Soviets of the generation prior did have rising standards of living but that stalled out.
It's hard to compare and depends also on what time period to use.
In USSR there was much less income inequality, food, housing and healthcare available for everyone, very good free education.
Modern Russia's advantages is that people have access to better consumer goods, provided they have money to pay for it. Also, access to uncensored information and ability to travel abroad (for those who can afford it).
Socrates99
Bottoms up!
From what I understand there was a time under Yeltsin that it dipped below Soviet standards but it's risen since then. Still I'd defer to actual Russians.
See, that comes back to the external Cold War forces more than the system itself. Soviets were practically locked out of participating in the global community by the Cold War. I certainly wouldn't want a corrupt authoritarian government but I dont want a corrupt kleptocratic oligarchy either and that's what we're both living with.
Yes, WW2 and Cold War to large extent shaped Soviet economical and political systems. It existed under strong economical and military pressure, had mobilization type economy and huge military. Nobody knows what it would look like in absence of external pressure, may be Gorbachev-like liberalization reforms could be attempted earlier and with better results.
Isn't this better divided by looking at vassal states versus Russia? The Soviets left a trail of victims. But of the former vassal states created after the collapse, what is the best correlate of how well they're doing today?
Traitorfish
The Tighnahulish Kid
I don't thin that there is any credible source for Falun Gong having millions of practitioners in Mainland China. These figures all originate with Falun Gong themselves, or with Chinese government agencies tasked with suppressing Falun Gong activity, both of which are incentivised to exaggerate the scale and organisation of Falun Gong within China. (Mostly the latter; the PRC don't need to exaggerate that much.) The figures given by Chinese defectors place it somewhere under one hundred thousand.
Possibly there used to be millions, and they were all chopped up to be sold as dog food; I don't think anyone can say for certain. But the idea that one of the largest mass-incarcerations in human history is occuring in densely-populated Chinese cities and nobody has noticed beggars belief. The PRC couldn't even keep its incarceration of Uighurs a secret, and that involves numbers considerably smaller than those alleged by Falun Gong, in a remote part of the country, among an ethnic group that is historically isolated from the country at large. Similar to the claim that the PRC sacrifices the beating hearts of dissidents to Kali Ma, the idea that this sort of thing is credible hinges on the Chinese government having been unable to keep a much smaller abuse secret; how do we square that?
I wouldn't be so sure. Once the Nazis were safely gone everyone in Germany admitted that ‘the thing with the Jews’ had been more or less common knowledge and shrugged it off.
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Back to actual Hong Kong (don't we have an RD Eastasia thread for Falun Gong and so on?) the latest report is that China is ostentatiously moving troops around in the Mainland. As scheduled, but ostentatiously this time.
And the protesters have now adopted a song from Les Miserables as theirs.
Breaking news from Eastasia: the Grauniad reports that Demosisto has stated one of its member, the recently-released Joshua Wong, has been ‘forcefully pushed into a private minivan on the street’, i.e. arrested without (known) charges.
Also Andrew Chan, head of the banned Hong Kong National Party, has been arrested at the airport while trying to board a plane to Japan:
I think that the PRC is going to follow a strategy similar to Putin's: relent only temporarily and arrest any leaders so that protesters are bullied into thinking that they cannot win.
Also Andrew Chan, head of the banned Hong Kong National Party, has been arrested at the airport while trying to board a plane to Japan:
The detention was requested by police, Chan said in a Facebook message., under the
A police spokesperson told HKFP that Chan was arrested on suspicion of rioting and assaulting a police officer. The Organized Crime And Triad Bureau are investigating.
Eight people, including Chan, were arrested in Sha Tin earlier in August for possession of offensive weapons. Police found petrol bombs and other items at an industrial building in Fo Tan.
His party was banned under the Societies Ordinance last year after the authorities deemed it a threat to national security.
A police spokesperson told HKFP that Chan was arrested on suspicion of rioting and assaulting a police officer. The Organized Crime And Triad Bureau are investigating.
Eight people, including Chan, were arrested in Sha Tin earlier in August for possession of offensive weapons. Police found petrol bombs and other items at an industrial building in Fo Tan.
His party was banned under the Societies Ordinance last year after the authorities deemed it a threat to national security.
I think that the PRC is going to follow a strategy similar to Putin's: relent only temporarily and arrest any leaders so that protesters are bullied into thinking that they cannot win.
innonimatu
the resident Cassandra
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Funny how, so far, the french government has had more people killed and maimed in its repression of the major protests this last year than the russians or chinese on theirs. It's also funny that the media talk about Russia is "Putin did this evil thing", whereas the media talk about china is never "Xi Jinping did this evil thing or that". The workings of propaganda are mysterious... my take from this is that the russians are slated for rehabilitation when they're someday under a compliant government, whereas the chinese are filthy foreigners to bring down hard... going along that clash of civilizations thing that certain people were so enthusiastic about.
But I'm surprised that the chinese managed to go along a "Macron strategy" so far. I expected them to be rather more crude. They may still become.
But I'm surprised that the chinese managed to go along a "Macron strategy" so far. I expected them to be rather more crude. They may still become.
Zardnaar
Deity
From what I have read and speaking to some ex Soviets, East Germans and Romanians here.
Towards the end things were bad, living standards peaked in the 60s and stagnated under Brezhnev.
There wasn't such a wealth gap, communist youth wasn't that bad you got to go camping and internal trips to Moldava and and Georgia Spa resorts.
You could receive packages from foreign friends and family. Levi jeans werevas good as hard currency. Leningrad ladies in the 80s would try and marry Finnish visitor's. Taxi driving was a prestigious/rich job.
East Germany had the highest standard of living, Czechoslovakia
and Hungary were the next best, USSR depended on when and where you lived.
At the bottom were Romania and Bulgaria.
The west probably should have helped out more. I thought everything would be peachy but stories of the collapse in Russia were here in the 90s. Putin looks good by comparison.
That, again, is a silly argument and you know it.
He is right about double standards.
Farm Boy
run boy run
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Maybe, yes. It's human enough. But some modest degree of honesty in reporting shouldn't be confused. I remember attending a wedding. The man in charge of policing a city the size of Chicago straight-faced us saying "rape isn't something that happens here, maybe it happens in Shanghai." The people I was there with mentioned that the Chinese girls dancing with black men were very brave. Not because of the black men, but because of the rest of their society's faith in them should there be a sticky wicket that then arise.
Then again, maybe I am only acquainted with horsehockybags.
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Lexicus
Deity
The key phrase here, imo...
Traitorfish
The Tighnahulish Kid
But there were plenty of eye-witness reports of the Holocaust while it continued. They even appeared in the British press. They just weren't taken very seriously in the West, because they were assumed to be exaggerated, either by hysterical Jewish and Polish refugees, or by Soviet propagandists. There is no comparable body of evidence for the supposed mass-incarceration of the Falun Gong, even though such reports would- as this thread has shown- receive an entirely sympathetic hearing in the West.
We're talking about the same French state that massacred hundreds of Arabs in the middle of Paris in broad daylight, and spent the next forty years insisting that it simply did not happen. I'm sure they can rise to whatever challenge Putin offers.
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Link, please?
Yes, but this thread is not about Emmanuel Macron so innonimatu's continuing pro-rightwing authoritarian single-party statements are, as usual, completely irrelevant and just a distraction from the issue at hand.
For the record, I'm not saying that the general indifference towards the plight of the Jews, Gypsies, Slavs and other intrinsecally inferior breeds of human being proves or disproves anything about Falun Gong, I'm just saying that examples of people massively writing off an ongoing massacre as foregone losses because those people were already acceptable victims (and their political leaders knew but didn't do anything) has happened within recent history, and I think that this is a bad precedent for Hong Kong. Falun Gong deserves its own thread.
