2026.08.01 19:01

In stark contrast to what Deng did in China, up to a million North Koreans starved to death in the 1990s because their government had already banned private farming and lived off Soviet handouts. The Soviet collapse in 1991 cut the free fuel and fertilizer that had kept the whole system afloat for decades, and energy imports dropped 75% almost overnight. North Korea had fully collectivized its farms since the 1950s, so farmers held almost no private plots and had zero reason to grow more than the state’s quota. When the free inputs vanished the system had no slack left. Floods in 1995 finished off what crops remained, and the Public Distribution System that nearly the entire population relied on for food simply collapsed in large parts of the country. City rations fell from 585 grams of grain a day in 1987 to 30 grams by 1997. The regime called it the “Arduous March”. And even after Kim Il Sung died the year the famine began, his son kept the exact same centrally planned system running for the next 17 years while hundreds of thousands starved. And that is the body count of full collectivization under communism.

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Rothmus 🏴@Rothmus

2026.07.31 18:43

800 million people were lifted out of extreme poverty in China thanks to a little bit of capitalism. Central planning doesn’t work. At least Deng Xiaoping saw Mao’s catastrophic blunders and understood that. Which is why when he took power, he ripped out the collectivized economy by the roots. >let farmers work their own plots and sell what they grew instead of farming for the state (food production soared almost overnight) >carved out Special Economic Zones like Shenzhen where foreign capital could operate under different rules than the rest of communist China > poverty crashed from nearly 90% in 1981 to under 4% by 2016 On his Southern Tour in 1992, Deng told CCP officials “to get rich is glorious.” He was right btw. And it is best done through private property and free markets.

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