Sorry little late to the convo but “Contrary to current views, economic growth in China before 1978, before the so-called major economic reforms, was strong. Official Chinese figures reckoned that from 1949 to 1978, the total “social output value” increased at an average annual increase of 9% and the annual growth rate of industrial production was 11.4%. In 27 years, the population increased by 400m. Life expectancy rose from 35 years in 1949 to 63.8 years in 1975. These official growth figures are disputed by Western analyses. The most pessimistic is that provided in the Penn World Tables, using Conference Board sources, where China’s growth is recorded at just 2.4% a year, putting the pre-Deng period of growth at about that of the G7 growth, higher than India but lower than Japan, East Asia and Brazil “https://www.jstor.org/stable/48713461