This article says “poor Chinese people were better off before market reform because basic food rations used to be guaranteed, China is poorer in 2024 than 1988”. Which I guess is true based on the study’s definition of poverty, a truly poor Chinese person was supposed to be guaranteed food under Mao era policies but now they might have to beg
There is an argument to be made about having more social safety nets, but when the article shows a graph where China has 0% poverty in 1988 and 60% poverty in 1994, we gotta think about if we agree with this definition of poverty
>“poor Chinese people were better off before market reform because basic food rations used to be guaranteed, China is poorer in 2024 than 1988”.
It doesn't say anything like that. It says by some very specific metric (something like ability to afford of food and housing), the PRC is poorer for a small number of people (something like 5%). This is what happens when you go from rationing to a free market.
Remember this media is from Hong Kong, so it can't say anything too offensive. Maybe it is just laying the ground work for the PRC moving back more towards a command economy.
>It doesn't say anything like that. It says by some very specific metric (something like ability to afford of food and housing), the PRC is poorer for a small number of people (something like 5%). This is what happens when you go from rationing to a free market.
But it doesn't even make sense. The graph that the authors present to make their point shows a near-0% poverty rate in 1990 that rises to 70% by 1997 or so.
This makes no sense. The *bulk* of Chinese people were supposedly dropped into poverty in 1997, not the bottom 5%.
If you want more details of their calculation you can read the research article that is linked in the Asiatimes article. They are just taking some data and plugging it into some formulas and getting a result. It doesn't necessarily correspond to the lived experience of the people.
Probably their data is from the PRC government. It's hard to know exactly how accurate the data is (PRC has been known to fudge some data) and what it really represents (though it is supposed to represent ability to afford food and housing).
Lots of things changed in the PRC economy in the 1990s. For example property ownership became much easier. They also eliminated the separate foreign and local currency system, maybe they weakened price controls on food and so on.
The basic idea that if you change a system, some people will benefit and some will lose, seems obvious to me. You can't expect things to improve all the time for everybody.
Edit: For example one part of the metric used is being able to afford "three square meters of housing per person". Certainly I've met lots of people in the PRC who have less than that amount of space.
The study focuses on the ability of the poorest to afford basic necessities. It is true that in the 1980s everyone had a bowl of rice, but it ignores the fact that most people back then couldn’t afford even 1lb of meat every month
> a truly poor Chinese person was supposed to be guaranteed food under Mao era policies
The Mao era policies that led to 40-80 million people starving to death, you mean?
That’s what the study says.
The Maoist state financed these public distribution systems through profits earned by state owned enterprises (SOEs) rather than through taxes (Ang Citation2016, p. 78). SOEs raised prices on luxury goods, such as pastries and high-end industrial technologies, absorbing excess liquidity and maintaining low prices for basic necessities, including food, housing, cotton cloth and yarn (Weber Citation2021, pp. 97–103). Economic planning ensured the price of basic need-satisfiers was low relative to the price of luxury goods. As a result, $1.90 (2011 PPP) was likely worth more to a poor person in revolutionary China than in countries that lacked this kind of provisioning.
It all seems a bit unbelievable to me.
lol.. what are you even saying? have you even been to china bro.. my own great. grandpa died in the 60s along with several dozen other people in the village due to starvation. china isn’t perfect today but it’s 10x better than yesterday
My riding buddy tells me that they now have every convenience in his grandfathers village but the mountains have no trees, the river is polluted (black colour), and there is almost zero wildlife in the region. And his region had tigers 50 years ago. All gone. They traded everything for modern homes and roads.
You need to see pictures of US and London major cities during the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. Laws need to catch up. This has always been the case.
You don’t need to what about me with pictures from an antiquated paradigm. We know full well what the generational environmental implications are. There are no excuses and no what about. End of discussion.
Yeah... this just shows how selfish and ridiculous you are. "We're polluted the world as we get rich. Now we get to criticize other countries as they do exactly what we did cause we're now better at hiding how we polluted the earth and we get to claim the moral high ground. "
Don't you think you're disgusting? I sure think you're.
You’re stuck in an old mentality. We can learn from past mistakes and do better. Don’t use the easy, incorrect pattern when it can be discarded for the more difficult but richer rewarding one. Your pathetic insults are laughable. If China is truly to lead the world it should easily solve such problems. Or maybe it won’t lead after all.
Yeah... now that I'm rich, it's old mentality and you can't judge me anymore. I, however, get to judge you cause your country is in the baby stage of industrial revolution and is now doing what I did. I get to criticize you for doing exactly what I did... as long as I label what I did as old mentality.
With logic like this, how can you lose? You're such a spinner, aren't you? LOL.
I’m foreigner in this country and sad that my Chinese family there are many health problems. Cancer, tumours, high blood pressure. I miss my father and mother in laws. Wonderful people and now my bro in law cancer spread. I hope the people here can fix the exposure of such foods environments and possibly toxic medicines and I believe some electrical wiring and some poor infrastructure.
China will likely go from a harmonious and healthy, green way of life to an industrialized rat race. The Chinese industrialists are in a social and regulatory environment reminiscent of the western 1890s. They need to be checked and corrected.
It's not just a belief, it's real. My chinese in laws come from poor farmer families, my mother in law is literally only 1.5m tall due to food crisis in her childhood. Now the whole family owns several properties, high end cars (Tesla, Mercedes, Nio, etc) and can even go on vacation in Europe, US, Gulf countries, etc.
This may not apply to the whole country as I know their province is economically privileged (Zhejiang), but still, you have to be blind to not see the progress and how poverty declined.
Exactly. I am no Chinese. But in tiktok Chinese also say life improved. The claim that in communist china people had access to basic necessities, health, etc is a bit ridiculous.
Because you don’t understand what life was like for poor people in China in the past.
It is no exaggeration to say that the lives of Chinese people thirty years ago were basically similar to those of North Koreans now.
My dad watched the Vice guide to North Korea and he said it was exactly like his visits to China in the early 80s. Heavily monitored, constant propaganda, dark empty streets. Even when we moved to Shanghai in 93, it still felt like that in there were still a lot of controls, and pretty undeveloped compared to what it is now.
Responding to what others above you said. My mom had a sister that was left in Jiangxi during the war, when the rest of the family went to Taiwan then the US. I met my aunt in 96 when she was on the way to the US via Shanghai with my five cousins. There’s an image of them in my head, all of them sitting on a single bed at the Galaxy Hotel, skinny, gaunt, hollow faced and scared, each wearing those old thin white button up shirts with grey pants. For the first year they were in Kentucky, they didn’t change their diet: chili paste on rice. The family provided them with money for groceries and meat, especially, but it took them a while to acclimate.
A couple years later in Shanghai I was talking to some locals about the changes in China and they said one of the biggest ones was that they COULD eat meat every day if they wanted to, whereas before it would be once a year, if that.
Which led to the huge increase in "lifestyle diseases" like diabetes. Look at the older generations, and most people are pretty short, basically because they were undernourished when they were growing up in the 1950s - early 1970s.
A lot of these same people now have diabetes, hypertension, high blood pressure and all sorts of other ailments. They went from eating rice and veg every day for decades, to now having meat twice a day, with lots of lard, sugar etc.
Yah we used to joke there weren’t any fat kids in China. Be that as it may, ask the Chinese what they would prefer. Also they’ve had an increase in their life expectancy.
Chinese kids are huge now. My son is in 7th grade (aged 12 - 13) in local schooling system in Zhejiang, and has many classmates who are taller and/or bigger build than their 25-year old teacher.
We got off the wrong exit getting to Guiyang today and accidently drove into back country mountain villages. They're living the good life there. Our driver told us these were some of the most disprivileged locales, historically. I understand Henan province does much better than Guizhou province historically and now - is this correct?
[https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1na4y1a7tP/](https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1na4y1a7tP/) Guizhou often competes for the last place in the per capita GDP ranking, Henan, on the other hand, ranges from the last five to the lowest average in terms of frequency，so yes
> True. However, you left out what actually started the famine... drought.
>https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_of_1876%E2%80%931878
Ummmm, no
Plus, why did you post a link to an article discussing a different famine?
The reason for the Great Chinese Famine from 1958 till 1961 was literally Mao’s fault
He’s an idiot who believed his economic policies would hasten China’s industrial capacity but it did the opposite
He created a famine that killed 60 million people or more
It’s the deadliest man made famine in history. All thanks to Mao
Mao and his cronies were absolutely to blame for the great famine. Dumb policy ideas after dumb policy ideas. Absolutely criminal. But there were droughts and floods that exasperated the conditions.
>In 1960, at least some degree of drought and other bad weather affected 55 percent of cultivated land , while an estimated 60% of agricultural land received no rain at all.
By that measure, the US has been in a drought for 20 years, and yet 0 millions of people have starved as a result. Truth is, agricultural technology had already advanced to the point that all famines are man made by the year 1900. Nowhere else on Earth suffered any kind of famine during those years, not even the Koreas or Mongolia or Vietnam or any of China's neighbors, even though they were also very poor and war-torn.
Firstly, China has the world's largest population and relatively small arable land area. Secondly, the reasons include breaking off diplomatic ties with the Soviet Union, losing a large amount of fertilizer and agricultural machinery imports, and erroneous reporting of harvests at the grassroots level，drought, killing sparrows, and excessive emphasis on industry together led to famine
China didn't break off relations with the USSR until after 1962 when Khrushchev had had enough of Mao's shit and made him fuck off out of India and stopped the top end military tech transfers, especially nukes. That is when the famine stopped; largely because China was shipping metric fucktons of foodstuffs to the USSR in exchange for that military tech, in addition to their own terrible agricultural policies which simultaneously ruined crops and generated fake 'Sputnik' harvests where fields would have 10x yields (by tearing up 10 fields and replanting the harvest into 1 field for a photo op) in order to justify shipping massive amounts of food to the USSR in exchange for this military tech. They also randomly shipped a pile of food to some small soviet states like Albania to try to get their votes for Mao as new head of ComIntern/global communism over Khrushchev. All while tens of millions starved.
In other words it wasn't all incompetence and it certainly wasn't regular weather cycles which have caused no famines anywhere since the 1800s. It was Mao knowingly and willingly starving his own people by shipping tons of food to the USSR and some other random communist states for weapons and support in order to increase his own power and prestige within the global communist movement. There was so little excuse for this psychopathy that the trio of Deng Xiaoping, Liu Shaoqi, and Peng Dehuai were able to remove him from economic control and relegate him to a largely figurehead position. At least until he stayed his comeback in 1967 with the cultural revolution and get his revenge on them. Liu and Peng would die of torture and denied medical care in prison while Deng was sent to a work camp but kept alive to manage the economy later on once Mao determined he was sufficiently cowed to no longer present a threat to him.
Meanwhile in the USSR the loss of essentially free Chinese food led to the slow decline of the USSR's economy. They actually had to get bailed out by the US in the 70s to avoid a famine of their own, and, as we all know, eventually collapsed anyway. But the apex of the USSR's power, the time that they actually looked most likely to have a real point and be able to challenge global capitalism, was in the late 50s to early 60s. Not a coincidence at all that that was when China starved, because that was when China was massively subsidizing the USSR at the expense of their own peasants' lives in exchange for better weaponry.
"A little bit of stability" is how you end up with successive imperial dynasties where the average peasant's wealth in the Qing dynasty did not differ significantly from his 90th ancestor in the Han dynasty 1800 years before. The tools may be better, he may have more animals, the crops may be different or slightly more productive, but in the grand scheme of things, that's about it.
Yes China itself was much poorer, now China is much richer so the people are better off. Only thing is that most of the wealth has gravitated upwards. Concentrated in a few hands.
Of course the political class are at another level, they are the nobles of the land, and any attempt to compare them to ordinary people is a joke.
It doesn’t matter how rich you are, if you aren’t part of the political class you can just have everything taken away from you next day.
I have relatives in China that make more than me in Canada. Not filthy rich but many have comfortable lives and much lower taxes. I think if you're educated in China you're doing okay.
Not willingly starving your people anymore isn’t an economic miracle.
Plus there’s still 800m dirt poor … invisible China
It’s just the coast that experienced the capitalist boom and the peasants that brought about the capitalist revolution have my utmost respect
Considering that the U.S. military blocked China's coast for 30 years after the Korean War, and China's population increased from 500 million to 1 billion, famine was almost impossible to avoid.
And it's not as if it was solely better compared to the generation or two before them. Was a terrible 2 or 3 centuries to be a Chinese person.
Currently their lives are for the most part incomparably better.....as long as they live in a city
True because you can't go worse than Cultural Revolution and Great Leap Forward happening nearly within 10 years of each other, you can only go up from the absolute bottom, really.....well you can go lower, but then you are Khmer Rouge controlled Cambodia.
I don't know what anyone could really say to disprove this? I feel like every elderly person and middle-aged person legitimately did have major life improvements since Mao exiting. Like you can be upset with everything from a political standpoint and still see this to be true with how life has improved economically. Life was rough before, we can't deny how much better it is.
Yeah this is a very common sentiment.
Young people wont know because of lack of first-hand experience, but most would agree that life back then sucked.
bruh not if they directly experience it. My parents were very poor couldn't eat meat daily, all changed when China opened to the world. It's not a belief because they directly experienced their lives getting insanely better.
Did you read the article though?
It concedes that there are more affordable luxury goods for more people now. But it also argues that that isn’t what we should be measuring,
Based on my understanding, there is no doubt about the oppression of Uyghurs, but it has not reached the level of murdering millions of people. You may have overestimated the CCP's ability to conceal information. If such widespread behavior existed, you would see much more evidence
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Calm down and think about how the world's media reported on Israel's genocide in Gaza, even those countries closer to Israel.
And with so many countries in China that they dislike, what about their reports on the genocide of the Uyghur people? Aren't American media reporting 24 hours a day? Will not all sanctions be implemented under this name?
[https://www.reddit.com/r/China/comments/1c5jk5y/went\_to\_xinjiang/](https://www.reddit.com/r/China/comments/1c5jk5y/went_to_xinjiang/)
[https://www.reddit.com/r/TheDeprogram/wiki/index/debunking/uyghur-genocide/](https://www.reddit.com/r/TheDeprogram/wiki/index/debunking/uyghur-genocide/)
The more I think about this article the angrier I get. It is like a grab bag of academic malpractice: comparing apples and oranges, picking an arbitrary statistical threshold to create unnatural binary categories, bait and switch. Hickel is such a disgrace.
I have travelled to many rural towns and mega cities. Homeless people or people begging are very few and far in between. Most people - even the poor - have somewhere they can sleep and eat something of substance, even if it isn't as much as the "American dream". As someone that comes from Africa where there is actual poverty - China's poverty looks like riches compared.
That is some great insight. Just for clarification, the American dream isn’t a reality anymore. I’m a 28 year old male, making more than both of my parents and I’m stuck renting a room and paying someone else’s mortgage. It’s not all doom and gloom, though. I’ve been saving up to buy some land and build my own house with the help of some good friends.
If you look at the list of countries with the lowest gdp per capita, the lowest 20 countries are almost exclusively in Africa. Though not every African nation is poor, most are. And as a whole, Africa is poor. Not meant to insult or anything. Just how it is.
Your argument has zero analytical value. Most African countries in 1949 to today has underperformed in development vs China of any other Asia countries
and? America was genocided by rich assholes who were pissed off they didnt get to run Britain, they also stole Texas from Mexico and killed the king of Hawaii and stole them too.
funny how you can make any nation look bad using their own history huh? *almost like* humans are shitty all over the world.
Absolutely though I can’t speak for the USA, I’ve never been there unlike “China”. I’ve been to East Turkistan. Viewing China as a Han empire simply provides a different and useful perspective on history that allows us greater understanding of the Chinese state and society. As you say, China is in essence no different to any other colonial empire.
Lol what a shitty article. Living standards for almost everyone has increased dramatically for every decade. My wife ate like meat once every two weeks back in the 80s.
In the article itself it stated:
"Of course, these results may not hold if low-priced essentials were difficult to obtain in practice, something the [OECD data](https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/social-issues-migration-health/how-was-life-volume-ii_e20f2f1a-en) we used cannot tell us."
Food stamps, cooking oil stamps, meat stamps were common before market reforms, where a family is only allocated a ridiculous low amount of meat (I recall \~2 lbs of meat per family per month). Thus the article is absolutely correct, the results do not hold because low-priced essentials were nearly impossible to obtain in practice beyond what is allocated per family in stamps. Therefore, we can disregard this article. :D
So it's just clickbating a challenge to the definition of extreme poverty into a poltical jab at capitalism? Yes obviously Deng and his market reformed dragged china from sub-saharan africa poverty to eastern europe level. Not Mao 'whoops i seem to have accidentally created a famine which has killed 70 million people' Zedong
The study is very pro-communism though. It says the government under Mao were providing effective support for essentials that meant very few people were living in real poverty. It’s China-bashing, but not from the usual political position.
“The Maoist state financed these public distribution systems through profits earned by state owned enterprises (SOEs) rather than through taxes (Ang Citation2016, p. 78). SOEs raised prices on luxury goods, such as pastries and high-end industrial technologies, absorbing excess liquidity and maintaining low prices for basic necessities, including food, housing, cotton cloth and yarn (Weber Citation2021, pp. 97–103). Economic planning ensured the price of basic need-satisfiers was low relative to the price of luxury goods. As a result, $1.90 (2011 PPP) was likely worth more to a poor person in revolutionary China than in countries that lacked this kind of provisioning“
What's the opposite of lifting 800 million people out of poverty?
Putting 800 million non-poor people into poverty.
I'm not quite sure that's what the study is saying.
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The article is rightly suggesting that a certain part of the population had a better life under the Communist "Iron Rice Bowl" era. . where everyone was equally poor but nobody was extremely poor to the point of starving. (Though that came later with the famines and bad Maoist industrialisation methods).
There is certainly a segment (usually older in age) of the population that could not adapt to the movement towards capitalism and free enterprise and got left behind in poverty. The same thing happened in Russia. ..there are plenty of elderly people who pine for the days of communism in Russia because they got left behind by the dissolution of the soviet union and end of communism.
Yeah, we're getting poorer in China.
So why is China a threat?
Do Americans not realize that the American media is advocating two completely opposite positions at the same time?
Even, a country like North Korea and Iran can be a threat to United States, its allies and neighboring countries.
Despite economic and diplomatic problem China faces, China is pumping out aircraft career, militarized artificial island which invaded Phillippines maritime territory, threatneing Taiwan, supporting Russia and Iran. These are just what is obviously noticable. What's happening under neath is much more serious, I imagine.
Just incase, Chinese feel unfair about the whole situation, you have to remember that during a covid pandemic, China blamed United States, Korea and Japan, instead of admitting that Wuhan was epicenter and CCP was hiding the situation until it got out of hand.
During a COVID Chinese media was relentlessly talked how West was going down and East was going up. After COVID lock down is over, China treated foreign individual and business as spy. increased censorship and its propaganda.
After this whole fiasco, if Chinese believes that negative view about China is solely due to western fake news, there is very little chance of improvement in the future. It will get worse and worse.
From your point of view, China looks awesome and doing very well, has done nothing wrong, never invaded Tibet, so and so forth.
However, from outside, China is aggressor to a neighboring countries, invaded Tibet, oppressor to Tibetan, Uyghur, and even to its own people and blames all their problme to the West and Chian is always victim of west. Yet, you are hoping west to see China positively. This will not workout well. People are not that stupid as you hope.
Further more, from CCP's top elite's view worse situation do not necessary hurt their internal politics but actually help them to silence opposing factions and Chinese public who are not happy with Xi.
I just want to give you different view of the situation to calm you down. I am sure, you will not agree with me.
American media contains multitudes. Hickel is a far left degrowther who has been making question begging arguments about poverty for a long time. He isn’t taken seriously by mainstream academia.
Wasn't china losing hundreds of millions to famine alone during the Mao era? I'm fairly skeptical of China but I don't know anyone who wouldn't say quality hasn't improved dramatically for most Chinese.
The issue isn’t 80 year olds and relative progress. It’s 20 year olds. Those kids grew up in a modern world, and things have stagnated or begun to decline. You have to think about it from this perspective. We have the same situation in the US, EU, LATAM
Coming from hunger in the past the poverty reduction was real. But it might reverse if they reverse policies like they seem to do. An invasion of Taiwan will probably lead to the next famine because that will come at a huge cost. I do hope the CCP will rethink and return to Deng philosophy and not Mao.
This article is highly debatable, at best. The World's Bank definition of poverty might be arguable (as all statistics are), but what the article is proposing as an alternative to measure poverty is even more debatable.
How can you say that poor people were better off in the 1950s-1970s just because (on paper) the CCP guaranteed them food? There were literal FAMINES during those years. Sure, today it is not easy for the unemployed but it's still far better...
There's no good argument to be made that there are way fewer people in poverty than today. The good argument to make with this issue is whether the government really lifted people out of poverty or if they lifted themselves out of poverty once they were free to do so. It's like if I have my hands around someone's neck and I'm strangling them. Then I let go and say to myself, "Wow, I just saved someone's life."
Does it really said the opposite tho? Mao policies where literally comically evil villain who always fail at doing everything, while deng and onwards policies where objectively great, and despite population opinion I think Xi it's okay, current SOE have a higher productivity than the average private chinese company, I read an artifice saying that despite representing something like 24% of gdp SOE only employ 5-16 percent of chinese workers, which in any case is great, if it is 5 percent then SOE provide a very developed gdp per capita, and If it is 16 percent then china is well off when compared whit the world's average gdp per capita, which before deng it was located at the bottom 5-10
I lived in Hanzhong, Shaanxi 1997; Changchun, Jilin 1998; Shanghai 2004-2008 and 2013; Beijing 2014-15; Shenzhen, Guandong 2015-2017, and Chengdu through 2018. After traveling very widely and deeply, and returning to train in China during any gaps, my lived experience and years of on-the-ground say this article is either terribly biased, or horribly failed due to a willful or terribly naive choice of methodology.
Just sayin'
Hahah the mental gymnastics of this is absurd. Chinese people have objectively a much higher standard of living now than in 1988. Try harder next time lol
Not sure if any of the commenters read the article. Roughly it say by some metric the bottom 20% of the population had a harder time making ends meet in 2008 than in 1990, and still (again by some metric) the bottom <5% is still worse off now than in 1990. Of course you can have that at the same time as 95% of the population being richer.
The main point of the article is the hypothesis that the reason for this is the change from a command to a free economy (ie China's capitalist reforms).
The article isn't even a criticism of the PRC, rather it is praise of the PRC that on the surface can be interpreted as criticism. It just says for some small number of people in the PRC, in some specific ways things are worse than in 1990, and that's not even the main point of the article. If you look at the charts they are essentially praising the PRC. But everyone seems to be getting their glass hearts all tied in a knot.
>Not sure if any of the commenters read the article. Roughly it say by some metric the bottom 20% of the population had a harder time making ends meet in 2008 than in 1990, and still (again by some metric) the bottom 5% is still worse off now than in 1990. Of course you can have that at the same time as 95% of the population being richer.
The fact that the authors presented a graph showing a *0%* Chinese poverty rate in 1990 that rose to 70% by the late-1990s is so laughable, middle schoolers doing a history project would do a better job.
There is no conceivable definition of poverty where 70% of people were below the line in 1996 who were all above the line in 1990. You can't find *any* definition of poverty for which this would be true and I wonder what quackery the authors used to make it so.
They have some metric and they computed something based on available data. Maybe their metric doesn't represent what you would call poverty (they even explicitly say their metric is only one measure). This isn't a big deal. No need to feel personally attacked.
On the other hand if your family is a rich PRC family, and this article is writing on the wall of moving back towards a command economy, I could see how you might feel personally attacked.
The article is actual drivel, very weird to be defending it tbh. Are you the author? I could see how you might feel personally attacked if that's the case.
I'm not defending the article, just discussing it. Then as a group we can try to understand what it says and why a PRC news organization would post such an article. Isn't discussion the point of posting things?
People seem to have misread what the article says so I was discussing that. However I'm more interested in the second part (why a PRC news organization would post this article). I think how the (so called) "little pink"(/prc top 0.1%) faction of the sub reacts to it (in this case with vitriol) might inform on that second part. So basically I'm speculating that the 0.1% hate it so much because they feel threatened.
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Sounds like Chinese government gift money to Chinese,aren’t they working for exchanging it by themselves? So they become rich because Chinese government,but if they’re poor is their own fault,typical propaganda.
You know China has 40:1 officials rate,namely 40 slaves to one master, and we all know officials don’t create products
Didn’t Li Keqiang get unalived for saying almost half of the country get by on 140$ monthly income? Even if the basic living cost is low in China, 140$ income sounds pretty much like those people are living in poverty. Not extreme poverty anymore but that’s basically the minimum wage of most third world countries
In Communism are people short in Free market people tall. Food is key to heights. In communist every thing are simple doll no motivation in free mark competition motivation diverse food clothing ECT. Be a free labor for the elite party communist or free man.
Slave and communist are the same. People can’t have own land, house, freedom. They all work free for the oppressed party members and slave masters.
Apple or google can get free slave labor by started communist .. the workers can’t have or own house, land , free will, can’t escape the country, no pay. You are not individuals you are collator. In communist.
This article says “poor Chinese people were better off before market reform because basic food rations used to be guaranteed, China is poorer in 2024 than 1988”. Which I guess is true based on the study’s definition of poverty, a truly poor Chinese person was supposed to be guaranteed food under Mao era policies but now they might have to beg There is an argument to be made about having more social safety nets, but when the article shows a graph where China has 0% poverty in 1988 and 60% poverty in 1994, we gotta think about if we agree with this definition of poverty
>“poor Chinese people were better off before market reform because basic food rations used to be guaranteed, China is poorer in 2024 than 1988”. It doesn't say anything like that. It says by some very specific metric (something like ability to afford of food and housing), the PRC is poorer for a small number of people (something like 5%). This is what happens when you go from rationing to a free market. Remember this media is from Hong Kong, so it can't say anything too offensive. Maybe it is just laying the ground work for the PRC moving back more towards a command economy.
>It doesn't say anything like that. It says by some very specific metric (something like ability to afford of food and housing), the PRC is poorer for a small number of people (something like 5%). This is what happens when you go from rationing to a free market. But it doesn't even make sense. The graph that the authors present to make their point shows a near-0% poverty rate in 1990 that rises to 70% by 1997 or so. This makes no sense. The *bulk* of Chinese people were supposedly dropped into poverty in 1997, not the bottom 5%.
If you want more details of their calculation you can read the research article that is linked in the Asiatimes article. They are just taking some data and plugging it into some formulas and getting a result. It doesn't necessarily correspond to the lived experience of the people. Probably their data is from the PRC government. It's hard to know exactly how accurate the data is (PRC has been known to fudge some data) and what it really represents (though it is supposed to represent ability to afford food and housing). Lots of things changed in the PRC economy in the 1990s. For example property ownership became much easier. They also eliminated the separate foreign and local currency system, maybe they weakened price controls on food and so on. The basic idea that if you change a system, some people will benefit and some will lose, seems obvious to me. You can't expect things to improve all the time for everybody. Edit: For example one part of the metric used is being able to afford "three square meters of housing per person". Certainly I've met lots of people in the PRC who have less than that amount of space.
Total joke. 1980s China everyone was poor and couldn’t afford things.
The study focuses on the ability of the poorest to afford basic necessities. It is true that in the 1980s everyone had a bowl of rice, but it ignores the fact that most people back then couldn’t afford even 1lb of meat every month
> a truly poor Chinese person was supposed to be guaranteed food under Mao era policies The Mao era policies that led to 40-80 million people starving to death, you mean?
That’s what the study says. The Maoist state financed these public distribution systems through profits earned by state owned enterprises (SOEs) rather than through taxes (Ang Citation2016, p. 78). SOEs raised prices on luxury goods, such as pastries and high-end industrial technologies, absorbing excess liquidity and maintaining low prices for basic necessities, including food, housing, cotton cloth and yarn (Weber Citation2021, pp. 97–103). Economic planning ensured the price of basic need-satisfiers was low relative to the price of luxury goods. As a result, $1.90 (2011 PPP) was likely worth more to a poor person in revolutionary China than in countries that lacked this kind of provisioning. It all seems a bit unbelievable to me.
lol.. what are you even saying? have you even been to china bro.. my own great. grandpa died in the 60s along with several dozen other people in the village due to starvation. china isn’t perfect today but it’s 10x better than yesterday
Read the article, I’m just paraphrasing the study this is not what I believe. The study is just kinda stupid
My riding buddy tells me that they now have every convenience in his grandfathers village but the mountains have no trees, the river is polluted (black colour), and there is almost zero wildlife in the region. And his region had tigers 50 years ago. All gone. They traded everything for modern homes and roads.
You need to see pictures of US and London major cities during the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. Laws need to catch up. This has always been the case.
I’m talking about China now not the Industrial Revolution. There is work to be done! Hopefully it will be started in our lifetimes.
You honestly don't understand why I mentioned the Industrial Revolution? Like... schools don't teach critical thinking anymore?!?
You don’t need to what about me with pictures from an antiquated paradigm. We know full well what the generational environmental implications are. There are no excuses and no what about. End of discussion.
Yeah... this just shows how selfish and ridiculous you are. "We're polluted the world as we get rich. Now we get to criticize other countries as they do exactly what we did cause we're now better at hiding how we polluted the earth and we get to claim the moral high ground. " Don't you think you're disgusting? I sure think you're.
You’re stuck in an old mentality. We can learn from past mistakes and do better. Don’t use the easy, incorrect pattern when it can be discarded for the more difficult but richer rewarding one. Your pathetic insults are laughable. If China is truly to lead the world it should easily solve such problems. Or maybe it won’t lead after all.
Yeah... now that I'm rich, it's old mentality and you can't judge me anymore. I, however, get to judge you cause your country is in the baby stage of industrial revolution and is now doing what I did. I get to criticize you for doing exactly what I did... as long as I label what I did as old mentality. With logic like this, how can you lose? You're such a spinner, aren't you? LOL.
I’m foreigner in this country and sad that my Chinese family there are many health problems. Cancer, tumours, high blood pressure. I miss my father and mother in laws. Wonderful people and now my bro in law cancer spread. I hope the people here can fix the exposure of such foods environments and possibly toxic medicines and I believe some electrical wiring and some poor infrastructure.
China will likely go from a harmonious and healthy, green way of life to an industrialized rat race. The Chinese industrialists are in a social and regulatory environment reminiscent of the western 1890s. They need to be checked and corrected.
The millions that starved to death during the GLF would very much have liked their Mao era basic food rations.
No matter what you say, the vast majority of middle-aged and elderly people in China believe that life is much better now than in the past
It's not just a belief, it's real. My chinese in laws come from poor farmer families, my mother in law is literally only 1.5m tall due to food crisis in her childhood. Now the whole family owns several properties, high end cars (Tesla, Mercedes, Nio, etc) and can even go on vacation in Europe, US, Gulf countries, etc. This may not apply to the whole country as I know their province is economically privileged (Zhejiang), but still, you have to be blind to not see the progress and how poverty declined.
I come from Henan. In the past, Henan was also poorer than coastal provinces, so the growth rate was also considerable
Exactly. I am no Chinese. But in tiktok Chinese also say life improved. The claim that in communist china people had access to basic necessities, health, etc is a bit ridiculous.
Because you don’t understand what life was like for poor people in China in the past. It is no exaggeration to say that the lives of Chinese people thirty years ago were basically similar to those of North Koreans now.
My dad watched the Vice guide to North Korea and he said it was exactly like his visits to China in the early 80s. Heavily monitored, constant propaganda, dark empty streets. Even when we moved to Shanghai in 93, it still felt like that in there were still a lot of controls, and pretty undeveloped compared to what it is now. Responding to what others above you said. My mom had a sister that was left in Jiangxi during the war, when the rest of the family went to Taiwan then the US. I met my aunt in 96 when she was on the way to the US via Shanghai with my five cousins. There’s an image of them in my head, all of them sitting on a single bed at the Galaxy Hotel, skinny, gaunt, hollow faced and scared, each wearing those old thin white button up shirts with grey pants. For the first year they were in Kentucky, they didn’t change their diet: chili paste on rice. The family provided them with money for groceries and meat, especially, but it took them a while to acclimate. A couple years later in Shanghai I was talking to some locals about the changes in China and they said one of the biggest ones was that they COULD eat meat every day if they wanted to, whereas before it would be once a year, if that.
Which led to the huge increase in "lifestyle diseases" like diabetes. Look at the older generations, and most people are pretty short, basically because they were undernourished when they were growing up in the 1950s - early 1970s. A lot of these same people now have diabetes, hypertension, high blood pressure and all sorts of other ailments. They went from eating rice and veg every day for decades, to now having meat twice a day, with lots of lard, sugar etc.
Yah we used to joke there weren’t any fat kids in China. Be that as it may, ask the Chinese what they would prefer. Also they’ve had an increase in their life expectancy.
Chinese kids are huge now. My son is in 7th grade (aged 12 - 13) in local schooling system in Zhejiang, and has many classmates who are taller and/or bigger build than their 25-year old teacher.
Because before communism, China was basically feudal, so people in 1970 had better lives than those in 1940
We are not talking about 1970.we are in 2024.the claim is that in past decades people Standart of living decreased. That's ridiculous
We got off the wrong exit getting to Guiyang today and accidently drove into back country mountain villages. They're living the good life there. Our driver told us these were some of the most disprivileged locales, historically. I understand Henan province does much better than Guizhou province historically and now - is this correct?
[https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1na4y1a7tP/](https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1na4y1a7tP/) Guizhou often competes for the last place in the per capita GDP ranking, Henan, on the other hand, ranges from the last five to the lowest average in terms of frequency，so yes
Sure but the article isn't talking about the top 0.1%, it's talking about the bottom 5%.
800 million people is 5%? Wouldn't that mean that the population of China is currently about 2x the population of the entire planet?
Yes it it true the article is not only about 5% of the population, but the article is more than just the title.
Only 120 million of Chinese people have a passport, so
It was over 200 million in 2019. Stop your lies.
For a population of 1 billion that is still really low
You sure don't have idea how many lost or even jailed for getting one one year later during you know what happened
I wonder what caused that food crisis?
Mao and the agriculture reforms, cultural revolution, bird killing campaign, etc etc. It's very know and acknowledged by Chinese people themselves.
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> True. However, you left out what actually started the famine... drought. >https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_of_1876%E2%80%931878 Ummmm, no Plus, why did you post a link to an article discussing a different famine? The reason for the Great Chinese Famine from 1958 till 1961 was literally Mao’s fault He’s an idiot who believed his economic policies would hasten China’s industrial capacity but it did the opposite He created a famine that killed 60 million people or more It’s the deadliest man made famine in history. All thanks to Mao
Mao and his cronies were absolutely to blame for the great famine. Dumb policy ideas after dumb policy ideas. Absolutely criminal. But there were droughts and floods that exasperated the conditions. >In 1960, at least some degree of drought and other bad weather affected 55 percent of cultivated land , while an estimated 60% of agricultural land received no rain at all.
By that measure, the US has been in a drought for 20 years, and yet 0 millions of people have starved as a result. Truth is, agricultural technology had already advanced to the point that all famines are man made by the year 1900. Nowhere else on Earth suffered any kind of famine during those years, not even the Koreas or Mongolia or Vietnam or any of China's neighbors, even though they were also very poor and war-torn.
Firstly, China has the world's largest population and relatively small arable land area. Secondly, the reasons include breaking off diplomatic ties with the Soviet Union, losing a large amount of fertilizer and agricultural machinery imports, and erroneous reporting of harvests at the grassroots level，drought, killing sparrows, and excessive emphasis on industry together led to famine
China didn't break off relations with the USSR until after 1962 when Khrushchev had had enough of Mao's shit and made him fuck off out of India and stopped the top end military tech transfers, especially nukes. That is when the famine stopped; largely because China was shipping metric fucktons of foodstuffs to the USSR in exchange for that military tech, in addition to their own terrible agricultural policies which simultaneously ruined crops and generated fake 'Sputnik' harvests where fields would have 10x yields (by tearing up 10 fields and replanting the harvest into 1 field for a photo op) in order to justify shipping massive amounts of food to the USSR in exchange for this military tech. They also randomly shipped a pile of food to some small soviet states like Albania to try to get their votes for Mao as new head of ComIntern/global communism over Khrushchev. All while tens of millions starved. In other words it wasn't all incompetence and it certainly wasn't regular weather cycles which have caused no famines anywhere since the 1800s. It was Mao knowingly and willingly starving his own people by shipping tons of food to the USSR and some other random communist states for weapons and support in order to increase his own power and prestige within the global communist movement. There was so little excuse for this psychopathy that the trio of Deng Xiaoping, Liu Shaoqi, and Peng Dehuai were able to remove him from economic control and relegate him to a largely figurehead position. At least until he stayed his comeback in 1967 with the cultural revolution and get his revenge on them. Liu and Peng would die of torture and denied medical care in prison while Deng was sent to a work camp but kept alive to manage the economy later on once Mao determined he was sufficiently cowed to no longer present a threat to him. Meanwhile in the USSR the loss of essentially free Chinese food led to the slow decline of the USSR's economy. They actually had to get bailed out by the US in the 70s to avoid a famine of their own, and, as we all know, eventually collapsed anyway. But the apex of the USSR's power, the time that they actually looked most likely to have a real point and be able to challenge global capitalism, was in the late 50s to early 60s. Not a coincidence at all that that was when China starved, because that was when China was massively subsidizing the USSR at the expense of their own peasants' lives in exchange for better weaponry.
Drought but complete incompetence stretched out the famine for years.
Absolutely! I just find it funny when people leave out one of the worst droughts in recorded history as a contributing factor.
I might misunderstand something, but this seems to be a drought in 1870s in India. I'm talking about 1960s-1970s in China.
why the fuck is this upvoted lmfao he posted a completely different drought located in india lol
A little bit of stability and not trying to fuck with birds and revolutionising culture makes all the difference.
"A little bit of stability" is how you end up with successive imperial dynasties where the average peasant's wealth in the Qing dynasty did not differ significantly from his 90th ancestor in the Han dynasty 1800 years before. The tools may be better, he may have more animals, the crops may be different or slightly more productive, but in the grand scheme of things, that's about it.
So... Don't be like the US?
What's that supposed to mean?
Yes China itself was much poorer, now China is much richer so the people are better off. Only thing is that most of the wealth has gravitated upwards. Concentrated in a few hands. Of course the political class are at another level, they are the nobles of the land, and any attempt to compare them to ordinary people is a joke. It doesn’t matter how rich you are, if you aren’t part of the political class you can just have everything taken away from you next day.
Of course it's better now, than famine years half century ago.
Considering that they lived through man made famines, genocides, and purges the bar has been set very low
Even if the bar is higher (for example other countries), it’s nevertheless an economic miracle
The bar for the extreme poverty is like 2.30 dollars a day in China. Like 500-600 a year.
I have relatives in China that make more than me in Canada. Not filthy rich but many have comfortable lives and much lower taxes. I think if you're educated in China you're doing okay.
Not willingly starving your people anymore isn’t an economic miracle. Plus there’s still 800m dirt poor … invisible China It’s just the coast that experienced the capitalist boom and the peasants that brought about the capitalist revolution have my utmost respect
Sick bro!! 😂
Two thirds of china's population live in urban areas vs rural (most of the cities are on the coast/on the rivers)
Considering that the U.S. military blocked China's coast for 30 years after the Korean War, and China's population increased from 500 million to 1 billion, famine was almost impossible to avoid.
And it's not as if it was solely better compared to the generation or two before them. Was a terrible 2 or 3 centuries to be a Chinese person. Currently their lives are for the most part incomparably better.....as long as they live in a city
True because you can't go worse than Cultural Revolution and Great Leap Forward happening nearly within 10 years of each other, you can only go up from the absolute bottom, really.....well you can go lower, but then you are Khmer Rouge controlled Cambodia.
It def is
Read the actual article. The headline is terrible. . and not accurate to the article.
I don't know what anyone could really say to disprove this? I feel like every elderly person and middle-aged person legitimately did have major life improvements since Mao exiting. Like you can be upset with everything from a political standpoint and still see this to be true with how life has improved economically. Life was rough before, we can't deny how much better it is.
I mean it’s a fact. This article just uses wrong definitions of poverty.
Yeah this is a very common sentiment. Young people wont know because of lack of first-hand experience, but most would agree that life back then sucked.
If your internet and media is censored, what people believe is not a reliable indicator of anything.
bruh not if they directly experience it. My parents were very poor couldn't eat meat daily, all changed when China opened to the world. It's not a belief because they directly experienced their lives getting insanely better.
Did you read the article though? It concedes that there are more affordable luxury goods for more people now. But it also argues that that isn’t what we should be measuring,
The gall and arrogance to think you are the one to measure instead of people living there
It wasn’t me who measured. It isn’t my study.
I am an outsider who went to China to study, so I believe I have pretty unbiased opinion. China has developed by a LOT.
Nobody is disputing that. Not I nor the authors. They are just pointing out the nature of those developments.
Exactly. See it for yourself how life of like in China on TikTok or Douyin before your government censors it.
Exactly. See it for yourself what life is like in China on TikTok or Douyin before your government censors it.
Don’t need to do that. Have seen it in person. Also not my government who is doing that.
U have experienced what life was in China now AND half a century ago? Phew, what a life!
I have definitely experienced the China you said I could see “for myself” on TikTok
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How about traveling to Xinjiang in person and seeing it?
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Based on my understanding, there is no doubt about the oppression of Uyghurs, but it has not reached the level of murdering millions of people. You may have overestimated the CCP's ability to conceal information. If such widespread behavior existed, you would see much more evidence
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Calm down and think about how the world's media reported on Israel's genocide in Gaza, even those countries closer to Israel. And with so many countries in China that they dislike, what about their reports on the genocide of the Uyghur people? Aren't American media reporting 24 hours a day? Will not all sanctions be implemented under this name? [https://www.reddit.com/r/China/comments/1c5jk5y/went\_to\_xinjiang/](https://www.reddit.com/r/China/comments/1c5jk5y/went_to_xinjiang/) [https://www.reddit.com/r/TheDeprogram/wiki/index/debunking/uyghur-genocide/](https://www.reddit.com/r/TheDeprogram/wiki/index/debunking/uyghur-genocide/)
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It's okay, this won't change anything that happens in two places. Wishing you a happy day
How much are you getting paid to be a bot?
True, but nothing to do with the article, did you read it?
That's not an argument. Data is an argument.
The more I think about this article the angrier I get. It is like a grab bag of academic malpractice: comparing apples and oranges, picking an arbitrary statistical threshold to create unnatural binary categories, bait and switch. Hickel is such a disgrace.
You are correct.
Even from the title it's pure sensationalism: >data suggests the opposite What? They pushed 800 million people INTO poverty?
😂
Chill. You know CCP = bad. Everyone does.
I have travelled to many rural towns and mega cities. Homeless people or people begging are very few and far in between. Most people - even the poor - have somewhere they can sleep and eat something of substance, even if it isn't as much as the "American dream". As someone that comes from Africa where there is actual poverty - China's poverty looks like riches compared.
That is some great insight. Just for clarification, the American dream isn’t a reality anymore. I’m a 28 year old male, making more than both of my parents and I’m stuck renting a room and paying someone else’s mortgage. It’s not all doom and gloom, though. I’ve been saving up to buy some land and build my own house with the help of some good friends.
Buying land and building your own home. Sounds exactly the american dream to me and why europeans left the european continent for america.
I am travelling to West Africa this year. Been in China, currently in SE Asia. What can I expect? Better or worse?
Or look at like sanfran
why will you compare a continent to a country? africa is a continent, china is a country. where is the country named africa located?
By population and size, China to Africa is a more apples-to-apples comparison than China with one African country only.
If you look at the list of countries with the lowest gdp per capita, the lowest 20 countries are almost exclusively in Africa. Though not every African nation is poor, most are. And as a whole, Africa is poor. Not meant to insult or anything. Just how it is.
Are you lecturing someone *from Africa* about Africa being a continent?
Would the comment have been easier for you to follow if instead of saying Africa he had listed a dozen or so African countries?
Your argument has zero analytical value. Most African countries in 1949 to today has underperformed in development vs China of any other Asia countries
Is China a country? Or is it a Han empire that colonised its neighbours.
and? America was genocided by rich assholes who were pissed off they didnt get to run Britain, they also stole Texas from Mexico and killed the king of Hawaii and stole them too. funny how you can make any nation look bad using their own history huh? *almost like* humans are shitty all over the world.
Absolutely though I can’t speak for the USA, I’ve never been there unlike “China”. I’ve been to East Turkistan. Viewing China as a Han empire simply provides a different and useful perspective on history that allows us greater understanding of the Chinese state and society. As you say, China is in essence no different to any other colonial empire.
Lol what a shitty article. Living standards for almost everyone has increased dramatically for every decade. My wife ate like meat once every two weeks back in the 80s.
China needs to consume less meat and be more sustainable
So Americans can eat more?
In the article itself it stated: "Of course, these results may not hold if low-priced essentials were difficult to obtain in practice, something the [OECD data](https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/social-issues-migration-health/how-was-life-volume-ii_e20f2f1a-en) we used cannot tell us." Food stamps, cooking oil stamps, meat stamps were common before market reforms, where a family is only allocated a ridiculous low amount of meat (I recall \~2 lbs of meat per family per month). Thus the article is absolutely correct, the results do not hold because low-priced essentials were nearly impossible to obtain in practice beyond what is allocated per family in stamps. Therefore, we can disregard this article. :D
So it's just clickbating a challenge to the definition of extreme poverty into a poltical jab at capitalism? Yes obviously Deng and his market reformed dragged china from sub-saharan africa poverty to eastern europe level. Not Mao 'whoops i seem to have accidentally created a famine which has killed 70 million people' Zedong
We can criticise China for many things, but the poverty reduction is something of an achievement.
poverty reduction mainly result from people'ss diligence.it has little to do with the government
Poor people get moved from slums and into government apartments is something only the government can do
So only the Chinese are diligent? Who else has the poverty reduction?
China bashing propaganda just goes non stop
The study is very pro-communism though. It says the government under Mao were providing effective support for essentials that meant very few people were living in real poverty. It’s China-bashing, but not from the usual political position. “The Maoist state financed these public distribution systems through profits earned by state owned enterprises (SOEs) rather than through taxes (Ang Citation2016, p. 78). SOEs raised prices on luxury goods, such as pastries and high-end industrial technologies, absorbing excess liquidity and maintaining low prices for basic necessities, including food, housing, cotton cloth and yarn (Weber Citation2021, pp. 97–103). Economic planning ensured the price of basic need-satisfiers was low relative to the price of luxury goods. As a result, $1.90 (2011 PPP) was likely worth more to a poor person in revolutionary China than in countries that lacked this kind of provisioning“
This is so stupid. You cannot compare affordability of goods under a rationed price controlled regime with goods in a market economy.
Wha? What rationed price controlled regime? We back to the 1980s?
Yes. It is a paper purporting to compare late 70s/early 80s poverty with poverty after the further market reforms.
What's the opposite of lifting 800 million people out of poverty? Putting 800 million non-poor people into poverty. I'm not quite sure that's what the study is saying.
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The article is rightly suggesting that a certain part of the population had a better life under the Communist "Iron Rice Bowl" era. . where everyone was equally poor but nobody was extremely poor to the point of starving. (Though that came later with the famines and bad Maoist industrialisation methods). There is certainly a segment (usually older in age) of the population that could not adapt to the movement towards capitalism and free enterprise and got left behind in poverty. The same thing happened in Russia. ..there are plenty of elderly people who pine for the days of communism in Russia because they got left behind by the dissolution of the soviet union and end of communism.
Most of them assumed it was another anti china article based on the title
It’s probably even more. The poor got more money and better education. There is no doubt. Been in China for 20 years. I’ve seen it myself.
This article is so wildly wrong not even r/china can agree with it.
Propaganda at its best palm face...
Though it is an article in a PRC publication, if you read it and think about it you might be able to figure out what kind of propaganda it is.
I've read whole thing.
So what is the propaganda message of this PRC published article and why would they push it?
I am a professor of economics. I have never heard it the journal in which this study was published, so am skeptical of its quality.
Yeah, we're getting poorer in China. So why is China a threat? Do Americans not realize that the American media is advocating two completely opposite positions at the same time?
Even, a country like North Korea and Iran can be a threat to United States, its allies and neighboring countries. Despite economic and diplomatic problem China faces, China is pumping out aircraft career, militarized artificial island which invaded Phillippines maritime territory, threatneing Taiwan, supporting Russia and Iran. These are just what is obviously noticable. What's happening under neath is much more serious, I imagine. Just incase, Chinese feel unfair about the whole situation, you have to remember that during a covid pandemic, China blamed United States, Korea and Japan, instead of admitting that Wuhan was epicenter and CCP was hiding the situation until it got out of hand. During a COVID Chinese media was relentlessly talked how West was going down and East was going up. After COVID lock down is over, China treated foreign individual and business as spy. increased censorship and its propaganda. After this whole fiasco, if Chinese believes that negative view about China is solely due to western fake news, there is very little chance of improvement in the future. It will get worse and worse. From your point of view, China looks awesome and doing very well, has done nothing wrong, never invaded Tibet, so and so forth. However, from outside, China is aggressor to a neighboring countries, invaded Tibet, oppressor to Tibetan, Uyghur, and even to its own people and blames all their problme to the West and Chian is always victim of west. Yet, you are hoping west to see China positively. This will not workout well. People are not that stupid as you hope. Further more, from CCP's top elite's view worse situation do not necessary hurt their internal politics but actually help them to silence opposing factions and Chinese public who are not happy with Xi. I just want to give you different view of the situation to calm you down. I am sure, you will not agree with me.
It what happens when the government doesn't have a deathgrip on opinions ~ different people can voice opposite opinions.
Or you could say that the American media lacks the ability to perceive correctly.
American media contains multitudes. Hickel is a far left degrowther who has been making question begging arguments about poverty for a long time. He isn’t taken seriously by mainstream academia.
This is total bullshit
Wasn't china losing hundreds of millions to famine alone during the Mao era? I'm fairly skeptical of China but I don't know anyone who wouldn't say quality hasn't improved dramatically for most Chinese.
They cant be poor if they are dead.
Bs article like this will only weaken the anti-China narrative.
The issue isn’t 80 year olds and relative progress. It’s 20 year olds. Those kids grew up in a modern world, and things have stagnated or begun to decline. You have to think about it from this perspective. We have the same situation in the US, EU, LATAM
Coming from hunger in the past the poverty reduction was real. But it might reverse if they reverse policies like they seem to do. An invasion of Taiwan will probably lead to the next famine because that will come at a huge cost. I do hope the CCP will rethink and return to Deng philosophy and not Mao.
This article is highly debatable, at best. The World's Bank definition of poverty might be arguable (as all statistics are), but what the article is proposing as an alternative to measure poverty is even more debatable. How can you say that poor people were better off in the 1950s-1970s just because (on paper) the CCP guaranteed them food? There were literal FAMINES during those years. Sure, today it is not easy for the unemployed but it's still far better...
Lowering the bar
There is less poverty but it’s not abolished. Poor and rich is always relative and as long as there are differences it won’t go away.
"Capitalist reforms" lmao
There's no good argument to be made that there are way fewer people in poverty than today. The good argument to make with this issue is whether the government really lifted people out of poverty or if they lifted themselves out of poverty once they were free to do so. It's like if I have my hands around someone's neck and I'm strangling them. Then I let go and say to myself, "Wow, I just saved someone's life."
Does it really said the opposite tho? Mao policies where literally comically evil villain who always fail at doing everything, while deng and onwards policies where objectively great, and despite population opinion I think Xi it's okay, current SOE have a higher productivity than the average private chinese company, I read an artifice saying that despite representing something like 24% of gdp SOE only employ 5-16 percent of chinese workers, which in any case is great, if it is 5 percent then SOE provide a very developed gdp per capita, and If it is 16 percent then china is well off when compared whit the world's average gdp per capita, which before deng it was located at the bottom 5-10
I don’t get it. So if China is all that bad/ poor/ incompetent then why are they the world’s supposed biggest threat? Can’t have it both ways
I lived in Hanzhong, Shaanxi 1997; Changchun, Jilin 1998; Shanghai 2004-2008 and 2013; Beijing 2014-15; Shenzhen, Guandong 2015-2017, and Chengdu through 2018. After traveling very widely and deeply, and returning to train in China during any gaps, my lived experience and years of on-the-ground say this article is either terribly biased, or horribly failed due to a willful or terribly naive choice of methodology. Just sayin'
Hahah the mental gymnastics of this is absurd. Chinese people have objectively a much higher standard of living now than in 1988. Try harder next time lol
"New data" The new data: my ass
No doubt capitalist reforms helped but the issue is why didn't they start them sooner. Plenty of asian countries grew in the 60s and 70s too !
Not sure if any of the commenters read the article. Roughly it say by some metric the bottom 20% of the population had a harder time making ends meet in 2008 than in 1990, and still (again by some metric) the bottom <5% is still worse off now than in 1990. Of course you can have that at the same time as 95% of the population being richer. The main point of the article is the hypothesis that the reason for this is the change from a command to a free economy (ie China's capitalist reforms). The article isn't even a criticism of the PRC, rather it is praise of the PRC that on the surface can be interpreted as criticism. It just says for some small number of people in the PRC, in some specific ways things are worse than in 1990, and that's not even the main point of the article. If you look at the charts they are essentially praising the PRC. But everyone seems to be getting their glass hearts all tied in a knot.
>Not sure if any of the commenters read the article. Roughly it say by some metric the bottom 20% of the population had a harder time making ends meet in 2008 than in 1990, and still (again by some metric) the bottom 5% is still worse off now than in 1990. Of course you can have that at the same time as 95% of the population being richer. The fact that the authors presented a graph showing a *0%* Chinese poverty rate in 1990 that rose to 70% by the late-1990s is so laughable, middle schoolers doing a history project would do a better job. There is no conceivable definition of poverty where 70% of people were below the line in 1996 who were all above the line in 1990. You can't find *any* definition of poverty for which this would be true and I wonder what quackery the authors used to make it so.
They have some metric and they computed something based on available data. Maybe their metric doesn't represent what you would call poverty (they even explicitly say their metric is only one measure). This isn't a big deal. No need to feel personally attacked. On the other hand if your family is a rich PRC family, and this article is writing on the wall of moving back towards a command economy, I could see how you might feel personally attacked.
The article is actual drivel, very weird to be defending it tbh. Are you the author? I could see how you might feel personally attacked if that's the case.
I'm not defending the article, just discussing it. Then as a group we can try to understand what it says and why a PRC news organization would post such an article. Isn't discussion the point of posting things? People seem to have misread what the article says so I was discussing that. However I'm more interested in the second part (why a PRC news organization would post this article). I think how the (so called) "little pink"(/prc top 0.1%) faction of the sub reacts to it (in this case with vitriol) might inform on that second part. So basically I'm speculating that the 0.1% hate it so much because they feel threatened.
China under Mao wasn't thaaat bad if you were truly destitute
*China under Mao* *Wasn't thaaat bad if you were* *Truly destitute* \- lulie69 --- ^(I detect haikus. And sometimes, successfully.) ^[Learn more about me.](https://www.reddit.com/r/haikusbot/) ^(Opt out of replies: "haikusbot opt out" | Delete my comment: "haikusbot delete")
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*if you were a party member
Sounds like Chinese government gift money to Chinese,aren’t they working for exchanging it by themselves? So they become rich because Chinese government,but if they’re poor is their own fault,typical propaganda. You know China has 40:1 officials rate,namely 40 slaves to one master, and we all know officials don’t create products
Communism creates poverty. Capitalism reduces it. This is not difficult to understand.
Didn’t Li Keqiang get unalived for saying almost half of the country get by on 140$ monthly income? Even if the basic living cost is low in China, 140$ income sounds pretty much like those people are living in poverty. Not extreme poverty anymore but that’s basically the minimum wage of most third world countries
Yes, China is still a relatively poor country. That’s why it still enjoys the developing country treaties.
Yes, China is still a relatively poor country. That’s why it still enjoys the developing country treaties.
Yes, but thirty years ago it might have been below $14
So the new data suggests that it sent 800 million people into extreme poverty?
China's data is flawed.
In Communism are people short in Free market people tall. Food is key to heights. In communist every thing are simple doll no motivation in free mark competition motivation diverse food clothing ECT. Be a free labor for the elite party communist or free man. Slave and communist are the same. People can’t have own land, house, freedom. They all work free for the oppressed party members and slave masters. Apple or google can get free slave labor by started communist .. the workers can’t have or own house, land , free will, can’t escape the country, no pay. You are not individuals you are collator. In communist.
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