Your argument is not history. It is selective memory, weaponized by ideology. Nobody denies the effort and resilience of the Chinese people. But to pretend the Chinese state "did nothing" is to deny the most extraordinary, deliberate, and large-scale transformation in human history. China’s poverty reduction was not an accident. It was policy. Who built the schools, the roads, the clinics, the power grids? Who coordinated land reform, industrial investment, and mass literacy campaigns? Who created the hukou, the SOEs, the Special Economic Zones, and then mobilized public infrastructure on a scale no market could ever match? You say the Chinese state "kept people in poverty." But without socialist land reform, there would have been no foundation for industrialization. Without collective investment, there would have been no possibility for reform and opening. Yes, market reforms mattered. But they only worked because the socialist phase broke the feudal order, united the country, and built the bones of the modern state. The opening-up policy of the 1980s did not abandon socialism. It weaponized it. It used state planning to invite markets, not the other way around. The state didn’t "lift" people like a parent carrying a child. It built the staircase so the people could climb. "Lifting out of poverty" is shorthand for structural change, not paternalism. And it is not an insult. It is recognition that the state, at its best, can turn history. That's what happened in China. The scale of poverty reduction is not propaganda. It is a historical singularity. Your family’s struggle was real, but it unfolded within a system rebuilt brick by brick. A system that replaced dependency on landlords and foreign capital with collective strength and self-reliance. Hard work creates improvement. But only sovereignty creates opportunity. And that sovereignty was defended, centralized, and organized by the same state you dismiss. China’s rise was not an act of charity by the state Nor of isolation by the individual. It was a dialectic: a unity of people and structure, of discipline and vision, of revolution and reform. You can reject propaganda, but you can’t erase cause and effect. The people built the nation. The nation made the people’s labor mean something. If you want to honor their effort, remember who built the platform beneath their feet. It was not the invisible hand. It was the visible, calloused hand of a people’s state. To deny that is to erase the very possibility of collective achievement. That erasure is the propaganda. China’s people lifted themselves, And they did it on the foundation of a state that refused to let the market decide who lived and who starved.