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Message: [QUOTE="Mike Barton, post: 10530769, member: 161255"] So you're saying South Korea in the 1950s wasn't a devastated wasteland? Compared to most of China at the time South Korea was one big smoking crater. And yet from that basis South Korea built a world-beating economy based on ship building, steel making and latterly electronics, while China under the Communists engaged in suicidal ideological navel-gazing leading to mass slaughter and famine and could barely produce cast iron cooking stoves. I am sorry, it is quite simply undeniable that the greatest factor holding back China from achieving its rightful place in the world for most of the second half of the 20th century was the Chinese Communist Party. To then give it credit for realising how imbecilic it had been for the previous 40 odd years is stretching the historical record to breaking point. [/QUOTE]