Of course GDP is an arbitrary abstraction, it's literally derived from arbitrary systems of measurement, i.e. why soviet had mps system and west had sna, and each get to decide what to value and how much... arbitrarily... and even when they calculate, a lot of it is guestimate because no one has perfect or even good data, especially 80 years ago in developing countries.

> starvation or the lack thereof is a strong indication of GDP

No that's just an indicator that some cohort starved due to distribution failure. And to be blunt... that cohort was rural / peasants doing mostly subsistence agriculture tier production that do not count much towards GDP. An urban worker in industry can generate 10x GDP surplus than farmers in a commune.

Hence starvation (mostly in rural) has disproportionately less GDP weight vs urban worker productivity. An economy losing millions of peasants while still modernizing/industrializing can easily maintain higher total GDP than peaceful agrarian society. AKA CCP speed running first 5 year plan post WW2 raised the GDP floor so much that they can unalive 10s of millions of peasants and still have higher GDP vs pre/post war which, was incidentally also not peaceful agrarian society, but even messier interregnum shitshow with significantly shit state capacity than relatively unified postwar PRC under CCP. Republican Era KMT (during anarchy/civil war) simply couldn't organize fragmented China to be as productive as PRC under CCP, who can lose millions of peasants with marginal productivity of labour near zero and still do massively better in gdp/economic terms.

GDP is an arbitrary abstraction: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imputed_rent

We could have simply not calculated imputed rent (or all of rents).