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No, communism did not leave China any poorer than Singapore; their GDP per capita was neck and neck in the early 70s. Yet it has been a very long time since communism and China now massively underperforms relative to modern Singapore, despite a fifteen head start on liberalization and more supposedly favorable demographics
Mao lives until 1976. China only really starts to grow in the 1980s. In 1980 the gdp per capita of Singapore is $5000
https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/SGP/singapore/gdp-gross-domestic-product
China has gdp per capita at the time of $125
https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/CHN/china/gdp-per-capita
That’s the difference between a low median income country and a dirt poor one
If you compare their GDP per Capita in 1960, during the Great Leap Forward when China should be at its absolute poorest, they’re $428 vs $89.5, AKA both miserably poor, among the poorest countries in the world.
Nowadays, many, many years after Chinese communism, Singapore has about 72k and is one of the richest countries in the world. China has about 12k, middling and even poorer than Malaysia, the low SAT* nation whose immigrants were predicted to drag down Singapore.
This is clearly making my point. And it’s an argument in bad faith. You start with 1960 - when China is still fully Maoist but not 1980, which is really where it reforms.
There’s clearly 20 years of growth where Singapore gets to exponentially increase where China did not. So by 1980 - to repeat myself - Singapore is at $5000 to China’s $125. Singapore increases ten fold while China barely grows by 50%.
Which actually makes my point about the previous 20 years and communism.
I’m not even sure what you are actually arguing for, I just know what you are arguing against, however badly.
I chose the low point of Chinese communism specifically to illustrate that even at its most destructive, it did not make China significantly poorer than Singapore. And no, it is not Singapore that had the twenty year head start over China policy-wise - hence their comparable growth rates during the 60s and 70s throughout the Cultural Revolution - but China that had policy and institutional head start over Singapore, which was a large statist, semi-socialist nation that only liberalized in 1995, fifteen years after China had liberalized FDI restrictions and started welcoming in multinationals.
To drag out how little the 1960 - 1980 era should matter to discussions of their modern, post communist divergence, we could even balance out those decades by freezing Singapore‘s growth for the next 20 years and allowing China to continue to grow at about 6.5%; 20 years later China would still have a GDP per capita barely over half of Singapore’s.
I am arguing that based on the deep roots, human capital model this entire discussion has been about, you should predict that China would be the richer of the two. That you see the exact opposite of this is likely evidence that deep roots has weak explanatory power for economics.
You said no, because of communism, so I pointed out that during the depths of communism China was barely poorer than Singapore, and since they both started at the same point and communism ended a very long time ago, its effects aren’t very relevant to our modern comparisons of their economies. The very fact that a country even can switch economic systems drastically, from communism to capitalism, is evidence that our institutions and economic performance are not constrained by culture as the deep roots theory would predict.
I’m not agreeing with the absurd premise about deep institutions. I am saying that the 20 year communist gap clearly matters.
I’d like to see your workings out on the 20 year freeze. I’ll come back to that
Even if it were true though China would have a per capita GDP of $35k - first world country and the biggest by far on earth. Per capita the same as Taiwan, more of less.
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Not according to the figures linked above:
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?end=1971&locations=SG-CN&start=1960
Singapore was about 11 times richer in terms of per capita income in the early 1970s, and the gap was growing. Since Deng, Singapore's lead has shrunk to 6 times that of China.
Ah I stand corrected, they look the same on the fifty year time scale, presumably because both are so close to zero. I think the point stands that both were incredibly poor during China’s communist era but only the country that the SAT* would predict to fail has become wildly successful, while the likely winner remained middling despite liberalizing first (but I’ll eat that mistake either way).
If instead of 1970 you compare their GDP per Capita in 1960, it’s $428 vs $89.5, which is to say the ratio is lower than today, about 5x instead of our modern 6x, after both countries have been liberalized for decades.
The ratios, also, i don’t think tell the whole story even if they have grown in distance. Two countries producing <$500 a year per person are both going to be largely agrarian, pre-industrial economies; the difference between a country producing $72k a year vs one producing $12k is the difference between being near the richest country in the world and a nation that’s still in large part off the grid.
Yes, the East Asian Tigers were all dirt poor in 1960. In fact, at that time, even "Made in Japan" was still identified with cheap, simple, and supposedly shoddy goods, much as China was 30 years ago, though things were changing rapidly: by You Only Live Twice in 1967, Japan had an image in the West of advanced technology and sophisticated industrial development.
Singapore is an odd one. There have been few states in history to single-mindedly pursue growth for so long. Like Hong Kong, it has the feeling of a country run by a profit-maximising corporation rather than a democracy, even though both countries have democratic elements. Both countries accept massive inequality but seek ways to mitigate it, so that e.g. in Hong Kong you can still live an ok life even if you are very poor: lovely free public parks, cheap public transport, cheap food (for essential items, not anything exciting) and lots of low-income jobs. "Domestic helpers" (servants) who come from South East Asia can end up very comfortable when they come back home, and they are "exempted" from the minimum wage (but still are able to save and send remittances).
Mainland China feels very, VERY different by comparison, even in the hyper-developing coastal cities. Far more of a sense of ideology and restriction. I wouldn't spend 5 minutes there unless I had to, whereas Hong Kong and Singapore are liveable and a lot of people like it (especially if they have a 6 figure USD salary).
The transformation of the poor East Asian countries into the modern tigers is endlessly interesting to me. I wrote an effort post a while back at the old place, I think partially inspired by a convo we had at some point, about what I see as America’s role in their development, though it’s far from the whole story. Whatever lessons there are to be gleaned in their takeoff eras seems crucial for other developing countries.
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It’s also been a long time since Communism in Germany, but the east is still poorer and generally worse off. Singapore is also a city state and China still has a massive rural hinterland that drags down GDP compared to the more developed urban centers.
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