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You call these “10 truths about China.” They are nothing of the sort. They are your personal breakup letter with Marxism projected onto a country you clearly do not understand. So let’s go through them. 1. “China is everything it is thanks to capitalism.” No. China’s rise came through reform and opening, markets, private enterprise, foreign investment, state planning, public infrastructure, industrial policy, state-owned enterprises, and an enormous state-directed development strategy. China did not abolish the socialist state and suddenly become rich. It built a socialist market economy. China’s constitutional order explicitly defines the country as socialist, while “socialism with Chinese characteristics” describes the system China developed by adapting socialist institutions to its own national conditions. Calling every successful part “capitalism” and every problem “socialism” is a rigged definition. For someone suffering from “Marxism-related PTSD,” of course every Chinese success has to be psychologically rewritten as proof that capitalism won. 2. “China is not everything it could be because of socialism.” This is not an economic fact. It is your imaginary alternate universe. You cannot measure the GDP of a China that never existed and then declare your fantasy richer. That is theology disguised as economics. 3. “Mao was the greatest criminal in human history.” Chinese people have never needed to pretend Mao was a god. China’s own historical judgment of Mao has always contained both achievement and responsibility. Mao and the older generation of revolutionaries did not inherit power from nowhere. They defeated the Kuomintang in a civil war because the Communist movement secured decisive support among the Chinese people and built the political and military strength to win. That historical achievement does not erase what came later. China has never denied that internal power struggles, disastrous political campaigns, and serious errors of judgment inflicted enormous losses on the country and its people. Chinese people are perfectly capable of confronting both sides of that history without needing lessons from a Peruvian ideologue who clearly knows almost nothing about China. So no, you do not get to compress one of the most consequential political figures in modern Chinese history into “the greatest criminal in human history” and then present your personal moral judgment as empirical truth. You are not describing history. You are advertising your ignorance. 4. “Without Deng, China would be poorer than Africa.” Deng’s reforms were transformative. That does not make your counterfactual true. Africa is not even a single economy. And Deng did not overthrow the Communist Party, dismantle the Chinese state, privatize everything, and install Peruvian libertarianism. He reformed China through the existing socialist state. The reform was Chinese. The institution carrying it out was Chinese. The outcome was Chinese. You do not get to erase the state that executed the reform and then award all credit to your preferred ideology. 5. “Mao hunted sparrows. Deng built skyscrapers.” That is X history for people who think a civilization can be summarized by two memes. The pre-reform period contained catastrophic political mistakes. It also created industrial capacity, infrastructure, state institutions, education, public health systems, and a national economic base upon which later reforms operated. Deng did not arrive in an empty field carrying a skyscraper. History has continuity. Memes do not. 6. “China was rocketing ahead until Xi arrived and slowed everything down.” Wrong causal story. China’s productivity slowdown was already emerging around the global financial crisis. Its later growth moderation reflects aging, diminishing returns to investment, property-sector adjustment, weaker productivity growth, external pressure, and the simple arithmetic of becoming a vastly larger economy. No country can sustain double-digit GDP growth indefinitely. You haven’t exposed Xi’s incompetence. You’ve exposed the poverty of your own economic understanding. 7. “Under a free market, China would tower above the entire West combined.” Another imaginary China. There is no dataset for “China under my preferred ideology.” There is only the China that actually exists. And the China that actually exists became an economic superpower through a hybrid system you apparently find ideologically inconvenient. That is your problem, not China’s. 8. “Marxist backwardness condemned China to mediocre second place.” “Mediocre.” China is already the world’s largest economy by purchasing-power parity. It produces roughly one-third of global manufacturing output. Its manufacturing share exceeds that of the United States, Japan, Germany and South Korea combined. If that is “mediocre,” the word has lost contact with reality. 9. “The Belt and Road was the greatest failure in modern history and served absolutely no purpose.” The World Bank itself has estimated that BRI transport infrastructure can reduce travel times and trade costs, increase trade and investment, raise incomes, and potentially lift millions of people out of poverty. Dislike particular projects. Dislike the financing. Dislike the governance. Calling an infrastructure network spanning Eurasia, Africa and beyond “absolutely no purpose” is not analysis. It is you losing control in a hysterical ideological outburst. 10. “China proves capitalism succeeds despite the state limiting it.” And here the trick finally becomes obvious. Whenever China succeeds: “Capitalism did it.” Whenever China has a problem: “Socialism did it.” Markets working inside China? Capitalism. State planning producing infrastructure? Somehow also capitalism. Industrial policy producing global champions? Capitalism again. A downturn? Ah, socialism has returned. You have constructed an ideology that can never lose because you simply rename every success as yours and every failure as theirs. That is not economics, it is religion. Your pinned post explains the rest. You were once a Marxist. You became disillusioned. Fine. But China is not your ex-girlfriend. It is not responsible for your wasted years, your broken friendships, your political disappointment, or your personal war with the ideology you once embraced. Stop using a civilization of 1.4 billion people as a screen onto which you project your own political trauma. You are not explaining China. You are explaining yourself.