China went through the Opium wars, the Sino-French war, the first Sino-Japanese war, the Russian invasions of northern China, the second Sino-Japanese war that led to the Japanese genocide against the Chinese, the Taiping Rebellion, the North Chinese famine, the Boxer Rebellion, the Dungan Revolt, the Chinese civil war, the Miao rebellion, Red Turban Rebellion, Panthay Rebellion, the Punti–Hakka Clan Wars, the 1911 revolution, the Laogai camps, the land reform movement, the cultural revolution, the Campaign to Suppress Counterrevolutionaries, the Great Leap Forward, and the list goes on and on. All of these events happened within the span of around 150 years, and the estimated death toll for them in aggregate is somewhere between 150 million to 200 million. Do you begin to comprehend how batshit crazy that is? Literally any sort of stability would’ve seen the life expectancy shoot up because there aren’t people dying left and right.

The same thing happened in Russia. They went through a lot of shit that ended up killing so many people, but once Stalin finally fucked off, the life expectancy went up. The same happened in Germany after WWII or India after the British or so many other countries that went through lots of horrible events in rapid succession. Once a stable government is in place, things will improve no matter how horrible the ruling regime is.