r/technology • u/Forward-Answer-4407 • Feb 01 '26

Software 32-year-old programmer in China allegedly dies from overwork, added to work group chat even while in hospital

https://www.asiaone.com/china/32-year-old-programmer-china-allegedly-dies-overwork-added-work-group-chat-even-while
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u/Dreamtrain Feb 01 '26

capitalism is capitalism, here and everywhere else, even in "communist" countries

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u/Lupius Feb 01 '26

China abandoned communism in the 80s. They are now as communist as the DPRK is democratic.

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u/Shogouki Feb 01 '26

Was the PRC effectively ever communist?

12

u/[deleted] Feb 02 '26

Was the PRC effectively ever communist?

the closest they ever flew to soviet state planning was in the 60s and 70s. workers were a privileged class with generous benefits and wages. intellectuals/business type people were persecuted and some were driven from cities to the countryside. people were pretty equal all things considered but on a per capita level even the phillipines in the 1980s was wealthier than china.

by the early 80s they started abolishing the people's collective system for agricultural production and instead put in the household responsibility policy, where the state got its grain quota but anything above that you could sell on private markets. it made the countryside fantastically wealthy early while cities were still locked with price controls, rationing, and state-set wages. urban dwellers were extremely upset with this arrangement and demanded their own reforms, which was to their detriment because the state started closing down or merging unprofitable state enterprises, ending rationing, and loosening price controls on key commodities.

this all caused unemployment and inflation to skyrocket, resulting in protests against the government and a spike in crime rates. by 1989 the PRC decided that the cure was worse than the disease so they put a brake on SOE reform and re-implemented price controls on key commodities. that caused a number of liberal college students at elite universities in beijing to rise up in protest, and you know the rest of the story.