My therapist made a comment about how China is a failed socialist experiment because they have 2-3 year olds working in factories. I responded “So we’ve been told.” She looks at me like I’m crazy. (Not a great look for a therapist) “I’ve not seen any evidence of that.”
“Because they’re such a closed country!”
“Which means you have no evidence to your point either?”
“Well, missionaries… anyway!”
The best thing about this is that I remember when the propaganda was that the one child policy had resulted in a generation of spoiled “little emperors”.
To be fair this is at least vaguely based in reality, at least for the urban middle classes. The combination of pressure to get good exam results + four grandparents doting on one child + both parents working, often absently + economic growth meant a lot of millennial kids (my generation) were extremely coddled. I didn’t grow up in China but I saw how my cousins grew up and yeah. The flip side was that they had to take twenty supplementary classes a week or something just to “keep up”, thank fuck the government has banned that shit how.