Under Mao, life expectancy literally doubled and the literacy rate went from 20-25% to 80%. And the increase in life expectancy is largely attributed to his vast state healthcare initiatives.
I have heard similarly glorious statistics for Cuba, and, until quite recently, for North Korea.
Visiting Cuba in 1992 it was obvious to me that living standards, literacy, and health, had collapsed since the revolution. People are living in the decayed remnants of what had been decently comfortable houses fifty years ago. People were hungry, frightened, and desperate.
It is clear that China suffered poverty and economic stagnation under Mao. You don't double living standards and life expectancy while having massive famines and operating an economy based on slave labor. Taiwan unambiguously and obviously experienced dramatic growth. Kuomintang rule was competent, efficient, and successful. Communist rule was a disaster propped up by foreign intervention.
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The latter. The former is an empirical claim I'm not yet sure how we could properly resolve. But there are reasons to think it may have been true.
After all the King is a Christian and so am I. It is merely that God has placed a greater burden of responsibility on him and one of toil on me. We all have our own cross to carry.
I'd say you're looking at the history of feudal hierarchy through rose-tinted glasses. People who are high in the instrumental hierarchy of decisions (like absolute rulers) also tend to gain a similarily high place in all other kinds of hierarchies ("moral", etc) due to halo effect and such. The fact that social or at least moral egalitarianism logically follows from Christian ideals doesn't mean that self-identified Christians will bother to apply it to their view of the tribe.
Remember, the English word 'villain' originally meant 'peasant'/'serf'. It sounds like a safe assumption to me that the peasants were treated as subhuman creatures by most people above them in station.