The article is complete garbage, picked apart well by the other reply you had.

Not least because it spouted off the Uyghur genocide bullshit to smear China.

“Like it’s the bible.” You are a fucking idiot. Trotskyists call shit imperialist then when you point out that they are wrong and don’t even understand the book that they pulled the term from you get accused of quote mining. Get a grip.

Trotskyists failing to understand Lenin’s Imperialism for the 1000th time.

Imperialism is the stage of Capitalism where a militaristic foreign policy is developed and employed as a continuation of economic policy.

China is not doing imperialism because it trades with other nations and helps them build infrastructure and factories in win-win negotiations. When was the last time China got a trade deal or negotiated settlement because it pointed a load of guns and missiles at its potential trade partner?

Just childish and pathetic both sides-ism of the social fascists.

Those citations from that page come back to a book written by Jasper Becker, a right-wing journalist expelled from Hong Kong in the 90s and who became a Tory Councillor in the 2010s.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungry_Ghosts:_Mao's_Secret_Famine

His book plays fast and loose with statistics, and the margins of error are huge - somewhere between 15 and 55 million people died in the famine but this citation seemingly suggests 65 million died, above that even cited in the books Wikipedia article. Reading the citations in the book’s article leads you to a number of American (and American Chinese) authored articles that all pluck various numbers from this vast range.

Even a cursory amount of research and poking around links those various citations led to makes the presented state of affairs that seemed so ironclad and clear cut almost melt into meaningless. What else can be expected from anti-communist hit pieces so readily shared by idiots hoping to spread atrocity propaganda.

And when the EU kills thousands and thousands of people in the Mediterranean for trying to enter, that’s just the cost of doing business I suppose. Dinghys full of people that EU coast guards could rescue but don’t, for fear of the influx of refugees and immigrants into the EU. Left to die, drowning in the sea.

But China is evil because it controls the internal movement of its 1.4 billion population?

Tell me again the population of the EU. Of the population of the USA.

China is a developing country, it has lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty by its policy decisions. It put an end to the famines that you attribute to malice as opposed to the costs of decades of civil war and invasion by fascist forces.

And all states are authoritarian, so it loses its explanatory value and is a useless term when used to isolate and describe individual states.

I’ve had two years of this now in my field, super fun to deal with especially when I have to do presentations and mock-reports for the interviews too.

Also, making a food diary and rating how bad your GERD is each day a little after each meal can help in working out what’s causing the worst of it. Look especially for trends: I can eat one meal in a week with onion or garlic in, but any more than that and I’ll be up at night with nausea and chest pain. It can be harder to work out by just looking at things that make it worse immediately.

If you’ve got GERD you can try eating a low FODMAP diet. Worth googling, lot of stuff from the NHS in the UK about it for treating IBS.

I had to cut out Garlic, Onions and most of that family of vegetables (alliums) as after trying to cut out the foods the low FODMAP diet suggests, those were the ones that actually caused my symptoms to cease entirely. I then returned to eating whatever else really I wanted, and I transitioned to vegetarianism and then veganism afterwards with no ill-effects over a few years.

Communism didn’t fail of its own accord, it was shot down, backstabbed and slaughtered by Western imperialists. No account of the failures of socialist governance is complete without acknowledgement of the wider context of the ‘Cold’ war and in particular US interventionism across the world post WW2.

And I know an expat family from China who are communists and broadly support China and the CPC.

Tit for tat anecdotes don’t Trump actual data.

Small outlets are fundamentally reliant on working with big clients to earn enough money for a decent wage, so you’re not achieving anything by going it alone. In no sense are you “balancing” the market.

A very enjoyable read, thanks.

I think he helped give a lot of solid ideas that the system itself could be reformed and reforged

Bro didn’t read the book

Zero possibility that this friend lied?

Some people love to lie especially if it gets a rise out of people. “Defectors” including the likes of Yeonmi Park from the DPRK also are financially incentivised to lie. I know people that lie about shit in the UK to make things sound worse than it is, and they will swear up and down it’s true after being called out on it.