That is correct, there were border raids which prompted the invasion, but the Sino Soviet split is what caused the worsening relations which led to that. Basically, the invasion was cringe, even if there was some justification for it, but what was more cringe was the repudiation of Stalin and the revisionism in the USSR that followed by corn boy.
True, the Sino Vietnamese war was an L, as expected of post Sino Soviet split Chinese foreign policy. And yeah I had the same concerns over liberalizing too fast, esp in the Jiang and Hu era, but it seems like that’s been reigned in too. Trust the process I guess.
Yeah that, and to expand a little, he was often derided by hardliners for being a sellout, and the plan to develop productive forces in China had some close calls from a full capitalist restoration. It seems to have worked out so far however, since the PRC was originally an impoverished pariah state, and now it is more advanced in many respects than the west. The work that needs to be done now is to take the productive forces that the capitalists gleefully supplied in exchange for cheap labour and turn it towards domestic production and consumption.
Its insane how much our favourite capitalist roader was vindicated holy shit. All that’s left is to press the communism button.
Purchasing power parity is imperfect but a step in the right direction, but direct metrics that aim to summarize all economic activity in a country generally don’t capture much nuance.
Trying to separate non productive things like finance capital jerking itself off and productive things like tangible goods and services is hard since the line between useful service and frivolous bullshit can be quite thin. It might be better to try and compile multiple metrics into an index that measures things like per capita income, purchasing power, home ownership, access to healthcare, education, transportation etc. but that’s a massive undertaking in it’s own right.