8 ms·

Extreme poverty is history in China, officials say

27 points by known 6y ago

koreanguy 6y ago
extremely unlikely , the wealthy in cities who hold the wealth enjoy all the benefits. any youtube search term about china will show you the reality
jimt222 6y ago
What about the Uyghurs? Disgusting Economist just a vehicle for CCP propaganda.
- LatteLazy 6y ago
  Agreed. China is going backwards socially for all its economic progress...
  - cambalache 6y ago
    The Chinese seem to disagree with you (https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2020/07/long-term-survey-reveals-chinese-government-satisfaction/ https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2020/07/long-term-sur...).
    - mensetmanusman 6y ago
      ? “ At the township level, the lowest level of government surveyed, only 11.3 percent of respondents reported that they were “very satisfied.” “ Also, they note they don’t poll migrant workers, those citizens with the worst lives.
      - cambalache 6y ago
        Nice juice you are going to do with all those cherries you picked. > We tend to forget that for many in China, and in their lived experience of the past four decades, each day was better than the next,” Saich added. “Our surveys show that many in China therefore seem to be much more satisfied with government performance over time, despite rising inequality, corruption, and a range of other pressures that are the result of the reform era.”
        mensetmanusman 6y ago
        I thought it was relevant because I can imagine a situation where you would never criticize an entity that can imprison you (99% approval for Beijing), but you then would vent your true frustration on local government.
      - dempseye 6y ago
        I worked with a Chinese lady whose parents were extremely poor, but who herself had been well educated and was successful in a professional job in Western Europe. I asked her, "are you happy with the CCP government?" She said that people in China simply do not think of it in those terms. Being "happy with the government" struck her as a particularly Western way of framing the question. I pressed her further and asked if she thought that they governed in a way that improved people's lives or made them worse. She said that she thought they improved people's lives, and that a country like China needs a strong government to hold it together, and that the CCP is succeeding in that respect. I don't know if this is a representative view, but take it for what it is: an account of what a single Chinese lady told a random person on HN.
        soupson 6y ago
        I can attest to a similar experience asking someone from China. The idea of being "happy with the government" implies there is something to do about being not happy with the government. It's a little like asking someone if they're happy with the position of the continents on the planet. Sure, you can wish that Australia were in the northern hemisphere, but that's sort of "besides the point." There is not a sense, in China, that any individual or group is in a position to seriously change how the government runs the country.
        NeutronStar 6y ago
        Asking someone who can be imprisoned for disagreeing with the government if they are happy with the government is a joke. Do you go around telling people to put you inside a prison with no recourse?
    - LatteLazy 6y ago
      I'm not even sure where to start with this. It's a complex issue and I appreciate the source. China is putting people into forced labour (or concentration) camps en-mass. Its arrested or exiled thousands of HK democracy protestors. Its going backwards on democracy and rule of law. Not to mention causing the largest pandemic of the 21st century (so far). Its support for North Korea is another whole mess. Oh, and it almost started a war with the neighbouring nuclear power. If people are satisfied with that, they're pretty socially bankrupt imho. What's more likely is that with absolute control of the media, the vast majority have no idea what's really going on. They're just reassured about how awful every other country is. In fairness, the camps and the plague weren't a thing till after the 2016 end of the survey. Xi Jinping only really ramped up his authoritarian storm in the last few years. I wonder how the average citizen there would react after an hour of straight forwards factual updates on the domestic situation. All this aside, I am glad they have eliminated extreme poverty. That is progress, socially as well as economically.
      - Bakary 6y ago
        This sort of stems from a vision of China that is based on the aspects most relevant to Westerners as relayed by the media. Of all the things you cited, the vast majority of Chinese were not impacted and will therefore view the government in light of all the boring and complex policy changes that did in fact affect them. Note that I am not so much criticizing the way the media frames China as much as simply pointing out the parts that aren't discussed but that are germane to the evaluation of the country. The notion that Chinese people aren't perceptive and that they would adopt Western ideals if only we could reach out to them is pretty much orientalism 101 mixed with the End of History. There is a wealth of diversity in terms of opinions at all echelons of Chinese society, including inside the Party structure. This diversity will tend to touch on ideas orthogonal to the Western equivalent. Similar or identical in parts, but very different in others. Picture someone whose only understanding of America would be specific events like Guantanamo Bay or a smattering of memes relating to Trump. You'd want to tell this person about the complex interplay of history and culture that shaped America into what it is today, and that they are missing out on 99% of it since they are so zoomed out. What I have described here is in fact the equivalent of what the typical person commenting on China thinks and knows about the country. I myself absolutely do not claim to be an expert, just that I got a taste of how much I don't know about the topic. All of this matters greatly since it has an effect on how the West will conduct its strategy going forward.
- heraclius 6y ago
  As much as it’s important to remember the plight of the Uyghurs especially in formulating a broad strategy towards China, it seems odd to extend this to ‘nobody may discuss any aspect of China without mentioning the camps’. Would you do this to, e.g., some intellectually interesting but (at the moment) otherwise entirely useless pure maths paper posted on HN written by a Chinese researcher? Of course, the level at which it’s appropriate to omit to mention an ongoing atrocity is difficult to determine. Clearly it’s somewhere above a sentence, and clearly it’s beneath the question of broad strategy. But I would suggest that understanding China’s broad strategy for poverty alleviation (in the Han heartland) is a discrete topic that can quite reasonably be discussed without inviting this sort of response. In fact, if you don’t understand topics like this, it’s likely that your response to China is going to be handicapped.
  - dayjobpork 6y ago
    So you want people to discuss the economy without mentioning the genocide camps of forced labour that underpin manufacturing?
    - heraclius 6y ago
      Uyghurs are important to a large part of the economy, but it’s presumably possible to discuss parts of it without discussing Uyghurs at every stage. Uyghur forced labour is certainly widespread and bad. I am not sure that it’s fundamental to the Chinese economy though. If we say that there are 20 million Uyghurs (which is a very large overestimate), out of 1.3 billion that’s not very much. Moreover the current strategy of forced labour mostly began in the 2010s, so all of China’s previous economic strategies managed to proceed without the use of forced labour. And sterilisation means that they’re unlikely to be relied upon economically in the long term—elimination and economic exploitation are very difficult to reconcile, as indeed the Nazis found. If you’re discussing some market in a small village far from Xinjiang—of course forced Uyghur labour in some way impinges on it, but, well, it would be odd to discuss the camps as the most important determinant of what’s going on in those camps at all times. You can’t develop an understanding of the whole without understanding the component parts, and that involves occasionally e.g. reading articles that don’t mention the Uyghurs. The obvious analogy is the Holocaust. Nobody complains about books about the Nazis that contain e.g. chapters mostly concerning matters other than the Holocaust. That’s for good reason: you have to pay attention to the other components too, even though the aim of extermination is an important overall reason to understand the Nazis. In the frame of my original comment, i.e., ‘at what level should one focus on specific individual parts even at the expense of overall important atrocities?’, I agree that discussing the economy writ large whilst ignoring the Uyghurs would neither lead to a good factual understanding of the economy nor be appropriate morally. But the question of poverty alleviation in the Han heartlands to me is a discrete one that (a) is important to broadly understanding the economy and (b) is a sufficiently narrow topic to be discussed without necessarily focusing on the Uyghurs.
- Bakary 6y ago
  Why would they vehiculate that when they have their own ideological line to attend to? The article reads like a classic Economist piece with the usual tropes
redis_mlc 6y ago
The article is nonsense: - China is in the midst of a major famine - the CCP is demolishing houses to resell the land - there is major unemployment due to corona and the trade war. The CCP is building a wall along the Vietnam border to prevent Chinese citizens from escaping from China.
- phyrex 6y ago
  Wat? You have a source for any of those claims? That seems like a lot of FUD to me.
- MeinBlutIstBlau 6y ago
  Much like the other guy, I too would be interested in some sources. I mean Alex Jones is right on occasion even though he touts about 95% nonsense embellished to make the 5% of truth seem more dramatic. Which is kind of what I'm suggesting about your comment.
- russli1993 6y ago
  Lol...this is so laughable. All of my friends in China are doing well. They love their country, especially after this year due to being safe from the pandemic. Food is still amazing and varied. Pork prices came back down to previous levels. Economy is doing fine. Most people I know want to be in China, escape to Vietnam? You are hilarious.
- dempseye 6y ago
  I echo the request for a source.
- tomjen3 6y ago
  I don't expect OP to provide sources, so I went looking for the evidence of the famine (I expect the party in a one party state to be corrupt and abuse its power and naturally people are going to unemployed when factories shuts down). And there does seem to be some evidence that China is facing, while not a direct famine, then at least potential food insecurity issues [0] serious enough that the leader started operation clean plate, encouraging people not to waste food, the same campaign Mao ran before the great famine[1]. In addition the virus hit at a point where farmers couldn't sell their crops and earn enough to buy seeds and fertilizer for the next year[1] China was also badly hit by the African Swine flue, resulting in a loss of 40%(!) of the Chinese pigs[1] which of course is not great for the pork prices. You can also see [2] but note that this is by a former political prisoner so it is biased. This article [3] says that the answer is that China is not facing a famine nownow, but may do so in the future and the the leader is running the campaign because most of the food is imported. They all seem to unanimously agree that prices have gone up, in some cases (pork) dramatically so (but the increasing prize of meat will not a famine make). [0]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/salgilbertie/2020/07/28/china-food-crisis-rising-domestic-prices-and-large-import-purchases-send-a-signal/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/salgilbertie/2020/07/28/china-f... [1]: https://moderndiplomacy.eu/2020/11/23/is-china-on-the-brink-of-a-food-crisis/ https://moderndiplomacy.eu/2020/11/23/is-china-on-the-brink-... [2]: https://thehill.com/opinion/international/516607-another-famine-coming-china-struggles-to-meet-basic-food-demands https://thehill.com/opinion/international/516607-another-fam... [3]: https://thediplomat.com/2020/09/china-food-security-and-geopolitics/ https://thediplomat.com/2020/09/china-food-security-and-geop...
joe_91 6y ago
As jobs transition out of China towards lower cost countries it'll be interesting to see how China handles the new middle class expectancies. Richer people tend to have more liberal views etc etc. Also, will they subsidise and keep their manufacturing base in-house or follow the US/EU in out sourcing to cheaper countries...
- cambalache 6y ago
  > Richer people tend to have more liberal views etc etc. Jesuschrist!, this have not been true at any point or place in history. People become more conservative when they become richer, which it makes sense, if you are wealthy and have lots of resources it suits you that the status quo remains. The RICH liberal elite is "progressive" as long as their income is not touched.
  - papaf 6y ago
    this have not been true at any point or place in history. The idea that professionals are more liberal formed one of the arguments in the book "The End of History". "Rich" in this case means not living in poverty. It doesn't mean billionaire.
    - cambalache 6y ago
      In LATAM(the place I know the best) middle class people tend to be center-right by a big margin compared to working class people. In the US things like NIMBY are in essence a conservative position taken by the middle/upper-middle class. The same happen with the school they choose for their kids, the self-segregated gated communities they live, the companies they work for and the closed social circles they frequent. They CLAIM they are progressive. But supporting your also-white-upper-middle-class-professional gay colleague is a far cry from the things that leftism are really concerned about, like income inequality,gentrification,environmental destruction, third-world labor exploitation,imperialism. On these topics your liberal FAANG friends at best do nothing about it and at worst they are the cogs supporting the oppression machine.
luxuryballs 6y ago
China announces a lot of things... it’s a communist country, I rarely trust officials from republics these days.
esarbe 6y ago
China has done an amazing thing in lifting so many hundreds of millions out of extreme poverty and even poverty. But then again; with the means of a tyrannical dictatorships I guess it's pretty easy to implement the policies that will do that. It just needs the leadership to overcome the vicious cycle of coup and purge and get their paranoia enough under control so they can stop promoting out of loyalty and start promoting out of competence. That is something that i.e. the USSR never quite achieved.
- trianglem 6y ago
  I think you need to be competent AND loyal to move up the chain in China as opposed to the USSR which is why their system actual seems to be working.
- imtringued 6y ago
  Despite the colonialism, Honkong was a blessing for China in the 21th century. It forced them to actually adopt capitalism. The last time China voluntarily invited an "expert" opinion from the west it ended in a massacre. They simply are not willing to change unless you force them to change. Many other governments are like that. They can easily do better but unless there is a power that forces them, they will stay the way they are forever even if it is worse.
dirtyid 6y ago
This is about extreme poverty 450rmb per month - 69 USD, worldbank definition from article is 57 USD. These folks are still poor as fuck. Here's 2019 individual income data for comparison: https://i.imgur.com/0tHsfxW.png https://i.imgur.com/0tHsfxW.png https://i.imgur.com/NCODvJY.png https://i.imgur.com/NCODvJY.png (under 450 exist because obviously not everyone employed, poverty alleviation has househould income calculations) 60% population still on less than USD 3700 per year. Very rough napkin estimate is bottom 60% generates 20% of GDP. The downside is there are still a lot of poor people in China, plurality in fact. Upside is they are so poor that the rest of the economy could elevate their conditions, but not by too much, so interventions must be strategic. Still a lot of work ahead.
- fuzzfactor 6y ago
  Seems to me like we have reached a more likely point than ever where one planeload of Chinese millionaires can go to any North American city up to a certain size, and with their dollars in hand have more cash real estate purchasing power than the local millionaires any more. Regardless of the poverty back home remaining overwhelming overall for generations to come, if no longer as extreme. And even with a poorer outlook regarding income inequality compared to the US.
foolzcrow 6y ago
$15 minimum wage for Chinese workers. Where is that?

27 points by known 6y ago

extremely unlikely , the wealthy in cities who hold the wealth enjoy all the benefits. any youtube search term about china will show you the reality

jimt222 6y ago

What about the Uyghurs? Disgusting Economist just a vehicle for CCP propaganda.

LatteLazy 6y ago
Agreed. China is going backwards socially for all its economic progress...
- cambalache 6y ago
  The Chinese seem to disagree with you (https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2020/07/long-term-survey-reveals-chinese-government-satisfaction/ https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2020/07/long-term-sur...).
  - mensetmanusman 6y ago
    ? “ At the township level, the lowest level of government surveyed, only 11.3 percent of respondents reported that they were “very satisfied.” “ Also, they note they don’t poll migrant workers, those citizens with the worst lives.
    - cambalache 6y ago
      Nice juice you are going to do with all those cherries you picked. > We tend to forget that for many in China, and in their lived experience of the past four decades, each day was better than the next,” Saich added. “Our surveys show that many in China therefore seem to be much more satisfied with government performance over time, despite rising inequality, corruption, and a range of other pressures that are the result of the reform era.”
      - mensetmanusman 6y ago
        I thought it was relevant because I can imagine a situation where you would never criticize an entity that can imprison you (99% approval for Beijing), but you then would vent your true frustration on local government.
    - dempseye 6y ago
      I worked with a Chinese lady whose parents were extremely poor, but who herself had been well educated and was successful in a professional job in Western Europe. I asked her, "are you happy with the CCP government?" She said that people in China simply do not think of it in those terms. Being "happy with the government" struck her as a particularly Western way of framing the question. I pressed her further and asked if she thought that they governed in a way that improved people's lives or made them worse. She said that she thought they improved people's lives, and that a country like China needs a strong government to hold it together, and that the CCP is succeeding in that respect. I don't know if this is a representative view, but take it for what it is: an account of what a single Chinese lady told a random person on HN.
      - soupson 6y ago
        I can attest to a similar experience asking someone from China. The idea of being "happy with the government" implies there is something to do about being not happy with the government. It's a little like asking someone if they're happy with the position of the continents on the planet. Sure, you can wish that Australia were in the northern hemisphere, but that's sort of "besides the point." There is not a sense, in China, that any individual or group is in a position to seriously change how the government runs the country.
        NeutronStar 6y ago
        Asking someone who can be imprisoned for disagreeing with the government if they are happy with the government is a joke. Do you go around telling people to put you inside a prison with no recourse?
  - LatteLazy 6y ago
    I'm not even sure where to start with this. It's a complex issue and I appreciate the source. China is putting people into forced labour (or concentration) camps en-mass. Its arrested or exiled thousands of HK democracy protestors. Its going backwards on democracy and rule of law. Not to mention causing the largest pandemic of the 21st century (so far). Its support for North Korea is another whole mess. Oh, and it almost started a war with the neighbouring nuclear power. If people are satisfied with that, they're pretty socially bankrupt imho. What's more likely is that with absolute control of the media, the vast majority have no idea what's really going on. They're just reassured about how awful every other country is. In fairness, the camps and the plague weren't a thing till after the 2016 end of the survey. Xi Jinping only really ramped up his authoritarian storm in the last few years. I wonder how the average citizen there would react after an hour of straight forwards factual updates on the domestic situation. All this aside, I am glad they have eliminated extreme poverty. That is progress, socially as well as economically.
    - Bakary 6y ago
      This sort of stems from a vision of China that is based on the aspects most relevant to Westerners as relayed by the media. Of all the things you cited, the vast majority of Chinese were not impacted and will therefore view the government in light of all the boring and complex policy changes that did in fact affect them. Note that I am not so much criticizing the way the media frames China as much as simply pointing out the parts that aren't discussed but that are germane to the evaluation of the country. The notion that Chinese people aren't perceptive and that they would adopt Western ideals if only we could reach out to them is pretty much orientalism 101 mixed with the End of History. There is a wealth of diversity in terms of opinions at all echelons of Chinese society, including inside the Party structure. This diversity will tend to touch on ideas orthogonal to the Western equivalent. Similar or identical in parts, but very different in others. Picture someone whose only understanding of America would be specific events like Guantanamo Bay or a smattering of memes relating to Trump. You'd want to tell this person about the complex interplay of history and culture that shaped America into what it is today, and that they are missing out on 99% of it since they are so zoomed out. What I have described here is in fact the equivalent of what the typical person commenting on China thinks and knows about the country. I myself absolutely do not claim to be an expert, just that I got a taste of how much I don't know about the topic. All of this matters greatly since it has an effect on how the West will conduct its strategy going forward.
heraclius 6y ago
As much as it’s important to remember the plight of the Uyghurs especially in formulating a broad strategy towards China, it seems odd to extend this to ‘nobody may discuss any aspect of China without mentioning the camps’. Would you do this to, e.g., some intellectually interesting but (at the moment) otherwise entirely useless pure maths paper posted on HN written by a Chinese researcher? Of course, the level at which it’s appropriate to omit to mention an ongoing atrocity is difficult to determine. Clearly it’s somewhere above a sentence, and clearly it’s beneath the question of broad strategy. But I would suggest that understanding China’s broad strategy for poverty alleviation (in the Han heartland) is a discrete topic that can quite reasonably be discussed without inviting this sort of response. In fact, if you don’t understand topics like this, it’s likely that your response to China is going to be handicapped.
- dayjobpork 6y ago
  So you want people to discuss the economy without mentioning the genocide camps of forced labour that underpin manufacturing?
  - heraclius 6y ago
    Uyghurs are important to a large part of the economy, but it’s presumably possible to discuss parts of it without discussing Uyghurs at every stage. Uyghur forced labour is certainly widespread and bad. I am not sure that it’s fundamental to the Chinese economy though. If we say that there are 20 million Uyghurs (which is a very large overestimate), out of 1.3 billion that’s not very much. Moreover the current strategy of forced labour mostly began in the 2010s, so all of China’s previous economic strategies managed to proceed without the use of forced labour. And sterilisation means that they’re unlikely to be relied upon economically in the long term—elimination and economic exploitation are very difficult to reconcile, as indeed the Nazis found. If you’re discussing some market in a small village far from Xinjiang—of course forced Uyghur labour in some way impinges on it, but, well, it would be odd to discuss the camps as the most important determinant of what’s going on in those camps at all times. You can’t develop an understanding of the whole without understanding the component parts, and that involves occasionally e.g. reading articles that don’t mention the Uyghurs. The obvious analogy is the Holocaust. Nobody complains about books about the Nazis that contain e.g. chapters mostly concerning matters other than the Holocaust. That’s for good reason: you have to pay attention to the other components too, even though the aim of extermination is an important overall reason to understand the Nazis. In the frame of my original comment, i.e., ‘at what level should one focus on specific individual parts even at the expense of overall important atrocities?’, I agree that discussing the economy writ large whilst ignoring the Uyghurs would neither lead to a good factual understanding of the economy nor be appropriate morally. But the question of poverty alleviation in the Han heartlands to me is a discrete one that (a) is important to broadly understanding the economy and (b) is a sufficiently narrow topic to be discussed without necessarily focusing on the Uyghurs.
Bakary 6y ago
Why would they vehiculate that when they have their own ideological line to attend to? The article reads like a classic Economist piece with the usual tropes

redis_mlc 6y ago

The article is nonsense: - China is in the midst of a major famine - the CCP is demolishing houses to resell the land - there is major unemployment due to corona and the trade war. The CCP is building a wall along the Vietnam border to prevent Chinese citizens from escaping from China.

phyrex 6y ago
Wat? You have a source for any of those claims? That seems like a lot of FUD to me.
MeinBlutIstBlau 6y ago
Much like the other guy, I too would be interested in some sources. I mean Alex Jones is right on occasion even though he touts about 95% nonsense embellished to make the 5% of truth seem more dramatic. Which is kind of what I'm suggesting about your comment.
russli1993 6y ago
Lol...this is so laughable. All of my friends in China are doing well. They love their country, especially after this year due to being safe from the pandemic. Food is still amazing and varied. Pork prices came back down to previous levels. Economy is doing fine. Most people I know want to be in China, escape to Vietnam? You are hilarious.
dempseye 6y ago
I echo the request for a source.
tomjen3 6y ago
I don't expect OP to provide sources, so I went looking for the evidence of the famine (I expect the party in a one party state to be corrupt and abuse its power and naturally people are going to unemployed when factories shuts down). And there does seem to be some evidence that China is facing, while not a direct famine, then at least potential food insecurity issues [0] serious enough that the leader started operation clean plate, encouraging people not to waste food, the same campaign Mao ran before the great famine[1]. In addition the virus hit at a point where farmers couldn't sell their crops and earn enough to buy seeds and fertilizer for the next year[1] China was also badly hit by the African Swine flue, resulting in a loss of 40%(!) of the Chinese pigs[1] which of course is not great for the pork prices. You can also see [2] but note that this is by a former political prisoner so it is biased. This article [3] says that the answer is that China is not facing a famine nownow, but may do so in the future and the the leader is running the campaign because most of the food is imported. They all seem to unanimously agree that prices have gone up, in some cases (pork) dramatically so (but the increasing prize of meat will not a famine make). [0]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/salgilbertie/2020/07/28/china-food-crisis-rising-domestic-prices-and-large-import-purchases-send-a-signal/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/salgilbertie/2020/07/28/china-f... [1]: https://moderndiplomacy.eu/2020/11/23/is-china-on-the-brink-of-a-food-crisis/ https://moderndiplomacy.eu/2020/11/23/is-china-on-the-brink-... [2]: https://thehill.com/opinion/international/516607-another-famine-coming-china-struggles-to-meet-basic-food-demands https://thehill.com/opinion/international/516607-another-fam... [3]: https://thediplomat.com/2020/09/china-food-security-and-geopolitics/ https://thediplomat.com/2020/09/china-food-security-and-geop...

joe_91 6y ago

As jobs transition out of China towards lower cost countries it'll be interesting to see how China handles the new middle class expectancies. Richer people tend to have more liberal views etc etc. Also, will they subsidise and keep their manufacturing base in-house or follow the US/EU in out sourcing to cheaper countries...

cambalache 6y ago
> Richer people tend to have more liberal views etc etc. Jesuschrist!, this have not been true at any point or place in history. People become more conservative when they become richer, which it makes sense, if you are wealthy and have lots of resources it suits you that the status quo remains. The RICH liberal elite is "progressive" as long as their income is not touched.
- papaf 6y ago
  this have not been true at any point or place in history. The idea that professionals are more liberal formed one of the arguments in the book "The End of History". "Rich" in this case means not living in poverty. It doesn't mean billionaire.
  - cambalache 6y ago
    In LATAM(the place I know the best) middle class people tend to be center-right by a big margin compared to working class people. In the US things like NIMBY are in essence a conservative position taken by the middle/upper-middle class. The same happen with the school they choose for their kids, the self-segregated gated communities they live, the companies they work for and the closed social circles they frequent. They CLAIM they are progressive. But supporting your also-white-upper-middle-class-professional gay colleague is a far cry from the things that leftism are really concerned about, like income inequality,gentrification,environmental destruction, third-world labor exploitation,imperialism. On these topics your liberal FAANG friends at best do nothing about it and at worst they are the cogs supporting the oppression machine.

luxuryballs 6y ago

China announces a lot of things... it’s a communist country, I rarely trust officials from republics these days.

esarbe 6y ago

China has done an amazing thing in lifting so many hundreds of millions out of extreme poverty and even poverty. But then again; with the means of a tyrannical dictatorships I guess it's pretty easy to implement the policies that will do that. It just needs the leadership to overcome the vicious cycle of coup and purge and get their paranoia enough under control so they can stop promoting out of loyalty and start promoting out of competence. That is something that i.e. the USSR never quite achieved.

trianglem 6y ago
I think you need to be competent AND loyal to move up the chain in China as opposed to the USSR which is why their system actual seems to be working.
imtringued 6y ago
Despite the colonialism, Honkong was a blessing for China in the 21th century. It forced them to actually adopt capitalism. The last time China voluntarily invited an "expert" opinion from the west it ended in a massacre. They simply are not willing to change unless you force them to change. Many other governments are like that. They can easily do better but unless there is a power that forces them, they will stay the way they are forever even if it is worse.

dirtyid 6y ago

This is about extreme poverty 450rmb per month - 69 USD, worldbank definition from article is 57 USD. These folks are still poor as fuck. Here's 2019 individual income data for comparison: https://i.imgur.com/0tHsfxW.png https://i.imgur.com/0tHsfxW.png https://i.imgur.com/NCODvJY.png https://i.imgur.com/NCODvJY.png (under 450 exist because obviously not everyone employed, poverty alleviation has househould income calculations) 60% population still on less than USD 3700 per year. Very rough napkin estimate is bottom 60% generates 20% of GDP. The downside is there are still a lot of poor people in China, plurality in fact. Upside is they are so poor that the rest of the economy could elevate their conditions, but not by too much, so interventions must be strategic. Still a lot of work ahead.

fuzzfactor 6y ago
Seems to me like we have reached a more likely point than ever where one planeload of Chinese millionaires can go to any North American city up to a certain size, and with their dollars in hand have more cash real estate purchasing power than the local millionaires any more. Regardless of the poverty back home remaining overwhelming overall for generations to come, if no longer as extreme. And even with a poorer outlook regarding income inequality compared to the US.

foolzcrow 6y ago

$15 minimum wage for Chinese workers. Where is that?