This is garbage. Essentially slaves? Health, education, access to consumer goods, percentage urban, all of these have been rising pretty much non stop since th

This is garbage. Essentially slaves? Health, education, access to consumer goods, percentage urban, all of these have been rising pretty much non stop since the 80's. I live in Shanghai and have for seven years. There are plenty of people here living in less than ideal conditions, like in the apartment on the first floor of my block where people are sleeping six to a room but it beats being a peasant easily. Subsistence farming sucks. Urbanisation is a decent measure of increases in the standard of living here because even the worst city has many more opportunities than the countryside. One of the big convenience store chains here, FamilyMart, the workers have 7 day a week, 15 hour day shifts. I've seen some employees in the same FamilyMart for years. They stay because it's better than what they'd be able to get at home. They work vastly more hours than the middle class do, mostly, but they're earning about the same per week as kindergarten teachers here do, with their degree and much better job, about 8,000 yuan a month. You know what the annual income is in the countryside? 10,000 to 20,000 in Anhui, maybe four hours travel from Shanghai. People work these terrible jobs because they're used to working harder, for less money. Subsistence farming is an awful way to earn a living and people get the hell out as soon as they can, in China now and for the past thirty years just like in the UK during the industrial revolution. People left the countryside to work in the dark satanic mills because the countryside was worse. People choose to work in FamilyMart when there are other convenience store chains with shorter shifts and days off so they can save money so they can do things like buy a house, same as offshore oil rig workers or sailors spend months away from their family. People make choices, in circumstances you or I would never wish on anyone but they're free to make those choices. They're not slaves.