Oh yeah. How could I forget the foreign currency tourists visiting from Tibet and Xin Jiang would have brought! 😉

yes. explains west germany and s korea. and the vietnamese economic takeoff after reunification!

genius with great historical perspective.

” Query: how would secession of Xinjiang and Tibet, or even Inner Mongolia (far less likely) have prevented China’s economic growth? ”

It would have cause significant economical disruption. National confidence takes a hit when the country break up.

Russia’s economy declined steeply post soviet breakup. They are finding their foothold only now.

Query: how would secession of Xinjiang and Tibet, or even Inner Mongolia (far less likely) have prevented China’s economic growth?

~zero effect. these regions exist as part of PRC due to nationalism and geopolitics. commodities are part of a global market. south korea is rich without the resource base on north korea.

I agree it was a crime but history will judge the PRC kindly..

We will never know what may have happened if they had not used tanks, but we do know what happened when they did.. it was a terrible crime.

Maybe you want to argue that China’s growth depended on the ruthless exploitation of the non-Han peoples of those regions … maybe not.

Not sure about the value of the death rate as a metric

Of course it has value, my comment explained this.

Human suffering is bad. Period.

And Death is a particular kind of Bad.

More of it is objectively worse not, “It Depends”.

Secondly is the fact about gross number of humans affected on account of the Statistical Scale Multiplier of India (and China).
Just because India and Germany have the same percent metric doesn’t really tell the actual reality in terms of HOW MANY actual Humans were rolled into this. This is paramount because emotion /feeling/tragedy is not a per-capita aligned dynamic.

Thirdly, is the fact that China had a different system and more political turmoil-cycles and yet it out matched India in both gross and percent and it outmatched Western nations in percent terms (for those who want to use that, though it is still trivial because 4-10 times more people get affected in China for an equivalent percent/per-capita statistical measure with a Western nation, hence the erroneous nature of it for this purpose).

Thus the point stands.
Indian Republic saw it causing far far far more suffering and death across multiple generations than China.
And the difference (the most significant one) was the Governance System. Every other difference was trivial, esp. when extrapolated over multiple decades and generations.

@Omar, From Chinese perspective, Tienanmen crackdown turned out to be great success. Had the protests snowballed, China would have suffered the fate of Soviet Union. It would have brought down the communist regime, and resulting chaos would have led to the break up of the country. Xin Jiang and Tibet would have seceded, possibly inner-Mongolia too.

Subsequent Chinese economic success was contingent upon the country staying intact and in a single piece. So yes, the two issues are linked.