Chinese docs behind 41 of 43 'fake' articles in British journal

Only if you don't know any context or history before Mao, sure.

Chinese 'culture' was already rotten to the core for generations before Mao. Remember the entirety of the 19th century? Humiliation upon humiliation of China. Doesn't matter how large you are or what potential you have, shitty governance can erase all that. Russian economy is behind Italy's, I say this as a Russian myself. USSR was also a feudal, backwards, agrarian society before Stalin. I wish Stalin all the worst for all his murders, but he did bring USSR out of feudalism and into 20th century by swift industrialisation.

Even polities with massive populations don't automatically become powerful simply by the weight of people, lest someone try to correct me here and say that anyone could have made China powerful today. Look at India. It will soon have more people than China, but where is the country now? I have a lot of respect for Indian democracy and I think long-term it will prove to be more stable than China perhaps, but it doesn't seem to be very effective at the same time.

China's rise has a lot to do with communism, whether Mao's 'communism' or Den Xiaoping's 'communism'. Neither of them were actually communist, they simply developed their own brand of indigenous philosophy that synthesised what they picked up from abroad with their own personal experiences in their own nation.

Culture isn't destroyed, this post smells vaguely of a more history-focused /r/lewronggeneration crap. China was enormously corrupt, hopelessly resistant to change and pathetically incapable of any sort of power projection. Now look at China. The culture was never destroyed, it was changed. USSR didn't destroy Russian culture, I am a Russian, I know my country, I know my parents, I know my grandparents and great-grandparents who were born before USSR.

/r/worldnews Thread Parent Link - timesofindia.indiatimes.com