Originally Posted by
Orphia Nay
China is a vast, complex, place.
Reducing the issues to right/left, black/white, isn't what we're here for.
Taiwan offers a great model for how China could have developed as a country if the communists had not taken over: it would hardly have been a perfect (or even guaranteed) transition from poor authoritarian developing country to a modern developed liberal democracy, but at least it would be a whole lot better than anything that the communists would do.
Just like with Lenin and the Soviet Union, Mao and his successors set China back a many decades by in effect entrenching the worst regressive authoritarian and illiberal tendencies of the regimes that they replaced. There's no need to balance the "good" they did with the "bad" simply because they don't depend on each-other.