Average means approximately half the population makes _less_ than that (In reality, probably more than half, because you need a lot of lower numbers to balance out the population making double/triple/quadruple/more than that).
I've lived in a country with vast scale poverty and what having an average income of over $1k would really functionally eradicate poverty. People are naturally communal in most places and will share resources within nested communities so that the distribution doesn't matter.
While I share your skepticism, there doesn't seem to be much room for cover-up here (though I'm sure the initial outbreak was significantly under-counted). My understanding is that restrictions are pretty minimal apart from strict control of travelers. So either there is basically no community spread or it's likely to be rampant - and then the hospitals would be overflowing like they are in the US, which is much much harder to cover up. I don't see how we can come to a conclusion other than that they've been quite successful.
Why do you graciously accept the numbers from the CCP while ignoring any evidence towards a cover-up? Do you actually believe the CCP has the pandemic under control? The amount of propaganda spread by the CCP trough their state controlled media is insane and wholly inaccurate. The CCP also conveniently put the blame squarely at foreign nationals bringing the virus over every single time. as if there are no cases of citizens transmissions at all. Transparency is expected in democratic countries. No such force exists in China.
I'm not accepting the numbers. I'm accepting the "hospitals are not overrun" observation, which is very hard to cover-up. I happen to know someone working in a Beijing hospital and it is not overrun. How else would you explain that except to say that there is minimal community transmission? The only other possibility is a country-wide refusal to hospitalize patients, which seems equally difficult to cover-up. Otherwise the cover-up could only ever be briefly temporary until the spread was rampant again.
They can't even cover up the prison camps in a far off landlocked province. Why would they be able to cover up hundreds of hospitals in the world's largest cities being overfilled?
Everyone can check if the hospitals are overfilled, the foreign reporters would be more than happy to say so if it were the case.
One part to clarify, you're quoting NTD/FLG/Epoch Times/Shen Yun/Bannon/New Federal State of China/Guo Wengui. Being partisan is fine. Just be sure to dig through to primary sources beyond editorials.
In general I agree, it's pretty unlikely that China is anywhere in the top 10 per capita, but there's still a lot of room for a cover up.
It could very well be that China chose to sweep it under the rug and has many more people dying than reported. But the number could still be perfectly average, which is not that much. And perhaps below since most of SE Asia seems to be doing very well regardless of policy. China could have 50 times the per capita death rate and would still be below average.
Certain wards are overflowing, hospitals as a whole aren't. Many if not most didn't have that much excess mortality. Not hard to cover up at all by simply not admitting people and/or providing sub-optimal care (in which case you'd have much more effective capacity).
> Not hard to cover up at all by simply not admitting people and/or providing sub-optimal care (in which case you'd have much more effective capacity).
That would create a lot of angry people who'll complain that the ward is overwhelmed, which would be counterproductive if the goal is to hide a huge case load while claiming zero local infections.
China is claiming 4,634 coronavirus deaths total in a population of 1.4 billion. Multiples of that are hardly a lot of people in such a vast country. Like with most healthcare systems anywhere in the world and especially in a $10k per capita country with a government-run system, care is already suboptimal, lines are long and people aren't too happy.
You don't need to tell anybody the coronavirus ward is full, they're not.
You make it hard to even get to a doctor, if they do you just send them home with a prescription. This illness progresses very fast. Many will simply die at home (which already happens everywhere, it would just happen in China at a much higher rate).
Those that call in an emergency you treat in a very suboptimal manner (untrained personnel, inadequate equipment etc) which gives you much more capacity. The reason wards are full in Western countries is higher standards and more regulation.
And again, none of what I have described is unprecedented or requires too much coordination. It's basically how the Chinese healthcare system already functions. By not doing much about the coronavirus and not giving local cases any press coverage, 90% of the "cover-up" is complete.
The only remotely conspiratorial part is not properly coding deaths as COVID. But then again, we already see large discrepancies in how countries code deaths for perfectly legitimate reasons.
I absolutely believe it. The main thing you have to take care of is the community spread and that's easy to control if you can control the community and that's pretty easy for the chinese government.
They probably do have more cases (like all other countries do as well), but the measures are way more effective if you don't have to care about people's personal freedoms.
The quote: Assessment by third-party agencies earlier this month showed that the poverty incidence in the nine counties in Guizhou decreased to zero percent and that the satisfaction rate among locals was over 99 percent, said Li Jian, director of the provincial poverty alleviation and development office, at a press briefing.
It does sound like that provincial bureaucrat was getting ahead of themselves. It doesn't sound like Orwell 1984, and it's not really the heart of the story.
> If anything certain muslim regions are far from happy.
"Certain Muslim regions" really means only Xinjiang and the Uighurs living within (and some of the much smaller Kazakh and Kyrgyz population, too). The Muslim minority in central China has long since assimilated to the Han majority in their political opinions.
The satisfaction rate is arguably a bad metric. Would anyone in rural China tell a government surveyor they were dissatisfied with their government-supplied job? I doubt it.
There's a reason this book: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1442256885/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b... spends so much time talking about the problems with government-supplied housing, income, jobs, education, etc ... it makes it nearly impossible to not side with whatever the gov says.
> Would anyone in rural China tell a government surveyor they were dissatisfied with their government-supplied job? I doubt it.
Of course they would if they can. Those are two different governments: the government-supplied job is supplied by the local government, while the surveyor is sent by the provincial or central government. Complaining to them about the local government is an opportunity to have the central government step in and rectify the issue.
Of course local governments know that as well, and to avoid having people tell on them, they use all kinds of tricks to deceive the surveyors. Depthpaper magazine published an investigative report last year https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/hXPd-mFNnnxQheR7tB64WQ on a particular case where the local government was ordered to stop trying to interfere (so their deception failed). One thing they did was to find out in advance which households would be visited, and then they handed out various goods bought in advance, to make it look like that family had been enjoying a relatively high standard of living for quite some time.
Since the central government's success rate at detecting cheating local governments is probably not that high, I expect that there are still a lot of counties that are officially above the poverty line but actually still below it.
There have been independent surveys of China, you know... 99% is obviously an overstatement but young people especially are genuinely very satisfied with their national government (less so locally).
I can't vouch for the accuracy of what's going on in China from my armchair atop an ivory tower, but where I live society seems increasingly in a decline of prosperity, I had to search long and hard for a job, execute and fund my relocation on my own, and most of the population had it significantly far worse than I did. But I live in a society where numerous objectively terrible Android games have 4.5/5 star ratings, so I have no trouble believing that a foreign country has a 99/100 satisfaction rating.
Cite a reason why you'd think it's dumb.
Denying that China has so far been very successful is a fallacy. Compare China to India, China was behind. Now it has leapfrogged ahead.
It is yet to be seen if China can reach the developed country status, which would require dethroning the dollar as the world reserve currency. However, just because China has been successful in the past doesn't mean it will be able to achieve this feat.
That's a sad attempt at shifting goalposts. Even as an Indian, I can easily admit that China has done far better economically than my country. Their awful repressive policies and authoritarian government are bad, to be sure, but economically there is no reason to complain.
You currently have a nationalist authoritarian government that is bent on curbing civil rights and is economically incompetent. It's not hard to imagine why China is doing better economically.
Don't forget the Great Leap Forward(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Leap_Forward). Sure, it was 60 years ago, but 18-45 million people starved in the service of the same authoritarian regime in power today.
China continues to bully its regional neighbors like Vietnam over dubious claims to the regional seas.
Now, to be fair, I'm typing this on land formerly inhabited by American Indians, in a nation with a history of lying to start wars and exploiting foreign nations for gain. But at least I am able to discuss these issues and push for changes to keep those atrocities from happening again.
You're able to discuss the issues, but you are very much not able to push for changes.
Nobody has successfully pushed back on any aspect of the war on terror my entire life, including 2 different Presidents who came in saying it should be rolled back. The newest one doesn't even give it lip service.
'CGTN (China Global Television Network), formerly known as CCTV-9 and CCTV News, is an international English-language news channel based in Beijing owned by China Central Television, a state-owned broadcaster.'
Not sure how many of the people on this thread have actually been or lived in China. I have lived there about 2 years and travelled fairly extensively. I cannot speak to these specific villages, but the amount of people lifted out of poverty in China in the last 50 years is probably one of the greatest achievements in human history along with modern science, medicine and rule of law.
lifting a billion people out of poverty, would be a big achievment in terms of economic planning, logistics and resource planning. those are no small tasks. also while maintaining social integrity. yeah, the ccp takes away a lot of freedoms, but how would you do maintain a cohesive society ?
Well the freedoms being taken away in this instance involve throwing certain religious groups into labor camps, so maybe consider the context of the argument.
has the west shown this is the case ? or it's an illusion of freedom ? here in the US, people vote and elect officials etc. But to those officials pass laws that help the people ? hardly so, but instead pass laws that benefit corporations firstly over human people. As a black person, I can speak up against mass incarceration, but do I have power to end it, NO. That's the illusion of freedom. It's the illusion that all men are equal under law, but we know the law treats you differently based on wealth, skin color etc.
You're looking at a country of a billion people, not only that this increase wasn't hoarded like it in the west it was government directed and shared out among most of the people in the country.
It's not a natural consequence of economic growth. The United States has hundreds of thousands of people living in extreme poverty, if not more, despite being one of the most developed countries in the world. Why didn't all the growth end it here?
These are semantic games. This isn’t talking about no one in poverty. This is the equivalent of the United States saying there are no states in a state of poverty. Would you care to characterize any states as being in a state of poverty? How is it defined for a state to be in poverty? Given this is a government created list that the government promised to finish by the end of 2020 and that no one but the government is capable of validating it, what are the odds this is at least somewhat a political tool rather than a legitimate accomplishment?
Rule of Law? Really? I applaud raising the people from poverty, but rule of law? In an authoritarian sense I suppose, not in a human rights sense though.
Comprehensive rule-of-law for the plurality for the majority of cases is largely on the horizon. Rule-by-law will of course co-exist for signifiant state matters, but that's a typical balanced arrangement for any competent state.
One of my high school friends has become a judge in my hometown (fulfilling his dream), and they are actually a team specialising in dealing with cases against local authorities[0]. I exchange conversation with him about all kinds of societal issues. I don't know how it can represent everywhere in China but I understand that the legal system has improved massively comparing with decades ago. In major cities most civil cases are ruled by law and working quite well. You can have any opinion you like but I find people completely dismissing a working legal system in China is a bit silly.
There is no separation of powers in China and therefore there is no rule of law. In theory the Party's congress could enforce a defacto independent judiciary, but the evidence is of course that they don't, they are the biggest theatrical production not called that.
If that wasn't enough you could trivially look up how many lawyers end up imprisoned or worse.
It's not even a bit silly to argue China has anything near a working legal system, it absolutely doesn't.
I'm talking about lower courts such as county/city courts that deal with all local level proceedings. They function just as English magistrates/county courts. I'm not sure how the separation of power has anything to do with these local judiciary. If you talk about corruption that's a different issue.
For me if these courts are exercising their judicial power legally and properly then we at least have a working civil legal system (not 'none'). There are unfair cases with international concerns but it's not unique to China. I don't think a majority of the local courts in China are malfunctioning or abusing power. If you have evidence to back your claim up I'm happy to read that.
Sounds like you don't read to many news papers by the way. You might want to check out what's going in in Hong Kong under Chinese pressure. Good demonstration of what the Chinese state thinks of independent judiciaries.
I'm sorry if I wasn't clear in my comments. Yes of course I am aware of the status quo and very much following all major events. What I was commenting was the general everyday activity involving law and legal system. I don't know how you get confused but I wasn't referring to events like the Hong Kong situation, which is clearly not a local level case.
I merely want to contribute to a meaningful discussion by personal experience so I wouldn't expand to those topics (in my opinion quite sensationalised by social media). I live in Europe now and absolutely understand what the general public are interested in.
If you have to be wary of not stepping into territory where the state will wield its heavy hand, then I just don't see how you can maintain it is functioning at a 'local' level. What's local? It's not like the Chinese state clearly delineates the boundary. And looking at the imprisoned lawyers, local authorities are not above blocking inconvenient litigation either.
I did not link to social media, nor do I use it, so please refrain from assuming it has any influence on the point I'm making. I'm sure perfectly fine litigation has happened, it would just be foolish to count on it. Maybe you're right that with an increasingly limited issue you luck increases.
I don't understand what you mean by 'wary of not stepping into territory where the state will wield its heavy hand'. I was simply giving examples of the part of legal system that I know of. Pardon my English, what I call 'local' is meant to be 'civil cases' like business and personal cases. And yes of course the legal system delineates those cases from national level cases. My original argument was that civil cases largely work well (unless you prove me wrong by statistics).
I didn't make any assumption of your information sources nor did I assert any influence of social media. It was only a general statement, not about anybody in particular. It was you who 'assumed' I didn't read any news etc. I fully respect all users' opinions here and would genuinely be interested to read any reference/articles to prove your points. I'll be surprised that the imprisoned lawyer cases were happening all the time in the lower courts.
So far, I live most of the life in China, IMHO, the root of our previous poverty is arrogance and one man in power (see Mao's policy which had led nation wide famine just because he want to surpass US in a short time), and that left us fall behind the world economically. And the latter so-called "lifted out of poverty" (a oftenly used propaganda tune in Chinese spokesmen to refute others' human rights infringement blame) is nothing but opening up the nation and letting our hardworking people to make products for the world (mostly in downstream application wise products, even nowadays, you see huge Chinese tech companies all cannot live w/o Github, btw, that's why government doesn't block github). Which is seen by me just recovering those years we had losing in politics and culture revolution.
>So far, I live most of the life in China, IMHO, the root of our previous poverty is arrogance and one man in power (see Mao's policy which had led nation wide famine just because he want to surpass US in a short time
How do you explain Poverty of India then? It doesn't suffer from one person in power.
India and China were roughly equal in population and GDP if you go back in time before the start of the British empire
Lifting that many people out of poverty is nothing sort of a miracle
> India and China were roughly equal in population and GDP if you go back in time before the start of the British empire
Any source for your claims?
The truth:
India population in 1800: 169 million [0]
China population in 1800: 322 million (nearly double India’s)
As for GDP:
China’s GDP (PPP) per capita in 1800: $316K [1]
India’s GDP (PPP) per capita in 1800: $177K
Note this is per capita. Factoring in the population difference, China’s overall GDP (PPP) was almost 4 times that of India. Hardly “roughly equal”.
I’m using 1800 as a reference year since it’s easier to find data for it.
And GDP (PPP) in 1980 (IMF estimates): [2]
China’s GDP (PPP) in 1980: $305K
India’s GDP (PPP) in 1980: $381K
India’s GDP in 1980 actually surpassed China: 4-5 times growth compared to China! (from 1800 to 1980)
This proves the grandparent comment that “IMHO, the root of our previous poverty is arrogance and one man in power (see Mao's policy which had led nation wide famine just because he want to surpass US in a short time”.
India’s population growth nearly doubles China’s (from 1800 to now) . Not surprising that, on average, more Indians are poorer than Chinese.
You don't need to look at 1800 data, because it is irrelevant. If you want to show what CCP did, you have to show the data in range. [2] is the chart comparing India to China from 1950 - 2010, which is the period when CCP is in power. I wish economy, society and history is so easy and everyone can nail down to a single sentence on the root of any economy phenomena. I love how he describe being poor was because of arrogance, lol.
Mao wants to surpass United Kingdom in 15 years and then US. Given China's condition at that time, if that is not arrogance, then it must be at least overestimation of his power.
It seams India was ahead for most of the past two millennia.
Population
CHINA INDIA
1AD 59.6M 75.0M
1000AD 59.0M 75.0M
1600AD 160.0M 135.0M
1700AD 138.0M 165.0M
1820AD 318.0M 209.0M
Estimated Real GDP per capita in 2011 USD (cgdppc in source)
Selection of roughly comparable dates (note no chinese GDP per capita estimates from before 1661).
CHINA INDIA
1600s $940(1661) $1228(1228)
1700s $686(1766) $1103(1750)
1820s $741(1820) $ 968(1821)
1900 $840 $1131
1950 $757 $1417
1980 $1690 $1143
2000 $4071 $2003
I wouldn't take this as gospel. These are estimates put together from patchy historical sources and probably widely innacurate. But it seems to indicate that India was ahead in population for much of the last two thousand years. And ahead of China in GDP per capita for most of the past 400 years.
>And the latter so-called "lifted out of poverty" (a oftenly used propaganda tune in Chinese spokesmen to refute others' human rights infringement blame) is nothing but opening up the nation and letting our hardworking people to make products for the wo
if that was the case there'd be fewer poor countries on the planet. The Chinese government has made many mistakes, a lot of them quite terrible, but a lot of progress over the last few decades also is the result of successful and active governance. Statecraft is not something that just happens or that is trivial.
Even just creating an open environment and the sort of conditions that let hardworking people do what they want is difficult, successful ecosystems are built, they don't happen because everyone at the party office just drops their suitcase and goes home.
> I cannot speak to these specific villages, but the amount of people lifted out of poverty in China in the last 50 years is probably one of the greatest achievements in human history
And you forget to say that the amount of people verged into absolute poverty by CPC is also the biggest shame of human history.
Nowhere else in history few hundred million people verge forcibly degraded back into stone age out of somewhat moderately industrialised economy.
Chinese people have nothing to thank communists for. Any opinion differing from this is preposterous.
You don’t think the British and the Americans had any blame for this? For why China was so poor, and had to dig themselves out of a hole in the ground?
After all, the criminal British Empire made their fortunes, by shoving opium down the throats of the Chinese for 100 freaking years!
And then Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who never had a job his entire life, and just one day became the American president, well, where did his family get their money from? Yes, that’s right. Opium. The Delano’s were also the biggest American drug smugglers during the opium era. And yes, when the Americans were talking about trading success with the Asians, they were specifically referring to opium, but they were too ashamed to admit it.
The Chinese opium era was the greatest theft, and the greatest transfer of wealth in human history!
Google it man. Educate yourself about the sins of the British and American empires.
At least after the CPC and Mao came into power in China, they finally eliminated the opium scourge, and kicked out the British dickheads from their country (except for Hong Kong).
> At least after the CPC and Mao came into power in China, they finally eliminated the opium scourge, and kicked out the British dickheads from their country (except for Hong Kong).
And then, he killed, and starved 60m of his countrymen.
I feel, you are under the influence of moronism. You just cannot see the bigger picture and connect the dots. Even though it’s right in front of your face.
If the British and Americans did not do what they did in the 1840s, then do you think someone like Mao would’ve come into power in the 1900s?
Were you also aware that China was under heavy sanctions from the United States, Australia, and the rest of the world after the CPC came into power? They could not buy food from abroad, since the white countries wanted to starve them to death. They could not trade to make money from their commodities. The ultimate goal of the white western nations was to starve China (but let’s not talk about any of that, because that would disrupt our brainwashing of the masses).
The British subsequently killed more people than Mao, because they set into motion a series of disastrous events.
Did you even realize China had a civil war in the 1850s, because of the British?
But of course, let’s ignore everything else, and focus our attention on Mao, since he’s an easy target. And forget about everything else that led up to him.
If you are referring to the Great Leap Forward, here's what Britannica says of its causes: poor planning + natural disasters. Sorry, there is no moral comparison between them. Mao "killed" millions of his countrymen in the same sense in which Trump did via his poor Covid response.
> Under the commune system, agricultural and political decisions were decentralized, and ideological purity rather than expertise was emphasized. The peasants were organized into brigade teams, and communal kitchens were established so that women could be freed for work. The program was implemented with such haste by overzealous cadres that implements were often melted to make steel in the backyard furnaces, and many farm animals were slaughtered by discontented peasants. These errors in implementation were made worse by a series of natural disasters and the withdrawal of Soviet support. The inefficiency of the communes and the large-scale diversion of farm labour into small-scale industry disrupted China's agriculture seriously, and three consecutive years of natural calamities added to what quickly turned into a national disaster; in all, about 20 million people were estimated to have died of starvation between 1959 and 1962.
In context of a stacked deck: century of colonial ravaging, postswar destruction and western bloc containment, the CCP had the ambition to pursue rejuvenation over stagnation and prevented the historic pattern of collapse and fragmentation. Of course there was incredible human costs, but on balance the right decisions were made. IMO Mao was more than 30% bad, but he maintained territorial integrity and the conditions for PRC to thrive. The generation he fucked over have nothing to be thankful for, but the generations that came after does, 30% bad is going to shrink with each year as Chinese comprehensive power grows. CCP today is not the same as CCP from 50 years ago, even if ideology seems to be once again converging. With exception of nuclear war, increasing comprehensive power will insulate the cost of making mistakes. There's simply more resources and tools for "harmonious" governance now, the soldiers that shot students because they didn't have access to riot gear is not going to need bullets when they have access to lethal alternatives, if social credit even allows situations to devolve that far in the first place. At the end of the day, CCP build modern China to credibly deter against external forces, situation is still far from good for many, but it's better than what most (arguably all other) countries could accomplish, and considering sheer Chinese scale, many Chinese are thankful for the outcome. Even the ones who fled and continues to flee with their wealth. There's something to be said for building indigenous nuclear, space and military program in the face of western sanctions, while simultaneously uplifting coastal populace in per capita GDP/PPP to rival the aggregate wealth and living standards of fellow developed Asian countries who got to where they are with US assistance.
> IMO Mao was more than 30% bad, but he maintained territorial integrity and the conditions for PRC to thrive
And ceded 1m+ square kilometres to USSR.
> The generation he fucked over have nothing to be thankful for, but the generations that came after does, 30% bad is going to shrink with each year as Chinese comprehensive power grows
Unless the country is not steered back into the abyss, which is seemingly is the case. They blew it all.
> China to credibly deter against external forces, situation is still far from good for many, but it's better than what most countries could accomplish, and considering sheer Chinese scale, many Chinese are thankful for the outcome.
Every Chinese citizen I know, hates the party with deep, deep passion, and that includes not so few party members themselves.
> CCP build modern China to credibly deter against external forces
You have to really turn on the TV.
I feel, you are in denial of objective reality under influence of virulent Xiism.
Yes, the CCP ceded land in majority of border settlements, but core interests were preserved. Relatively minor cost for actually mitigating external frictions seeing as how the only remaining land border India/Bhutan is causing so much shit show now not to mention SCS disputes. Or China would be in a better position had they not acceded to Mongolian independence.
>hates the party with deep, deep passion
I mean... what else is new? Not many countries with widespread support for their government, especially now, times are hard for almost everyone, everywhere. Citizens in multiparty systems hate their politicians too, they just also happen to hate rival parties more. Modernity + capitalism is stressful, personally preferable stress than being subsistence farmers. Maybe some prefer if China was contained and stagnant in an agrarian society. Most of my extended family hates the CCP, lost everything during cultural revolution. Some got fucked again during Xi's corruption crack downs. More lament at their kids future because competing in the world's largest country isn't easy. Most of them could also sell their tier1 city condos and retire comfortably in any western country as millionaires. These are people who benefited enormously from the system. People aren't rational.
>virulent Xiism
I wasn't a fan of Xi, but he inherited unfavorable geopolitical conditions and in retrospect seized the right opportunities. US pivoted to Asia before him, the relationship was always going to devolve into competition. Hide and bide was on last legs, and Trump didn't help with setting new truculence. They managed situation OK considering how this wildcard US admin was stacked with China Hawks. Pompeo isn't sailing carriers groups through the Taiwan Strait anymore, and the weapons sales are a pittance compared to the 90s.
>They blew it all
US anxiety and to rise of China threat was always going to be triggered by a combination of Chinese economy eclipsing US and scale of Chinese military buildup commiserate with 14T economy. It's inevitable. But economy and military reformed are basically at a level of appropriate competitiveness and regional deterrence to address shifting US foreign policy. Maybe another few years would help with the IC / turbojet situation, but US was cracking down on MIC2025 since Obama. 20 years ago, Chinese hated the government, worshipped the west, and couldn't dream of a world outside of western hegemony. Now they're somewhat confident about the government and recognize the west are not untouchable. Hate + confidence is an improvement. I didn't think I'd live to see the day where comfy Chinese diaspora in the west or international students want to go back, but those conversations are happening.
This comment is correct. Many Chinese international students do not want to lose their Chinese passport because they believe in the economic opportunity in China.
If you chose your words carefully and still state "forcibly degraded back into stone age out of somewhat moderately industrialised economy", one would expect the GDP per capita to revert to 1 USD. In reality, GDP per capita grew to 89 USD in 1960, at its worst reverted to 71 USD during the height of the famine and recovered 3 years later to 98 USD.
I am working in media / intelligence community focused on China for last 7 years. Everyone who believes Chinese official economic numbers, or communist propaganda mouthpiece CGTN, is fooling himself (...and usually, eventually regrets it:) ).
Economics is a zero-sum-game; if they lifted everyone in China out of poverty, then poverty is exported to other countries or the nature paid all the costs.
Edit:
Nature is a silent sufferer in the economics. It acted as cushion to our misadventures, a-bomb(wars), oil-spills, co2 & other gases, industrial wastes, nuclear wastes.
For a person to become rich, they have to earn profit dishonestly; if profit is shared equally nobody is richer. Somebody is getting short end of the stick to make someone else richer.
If everyone is self-sufficient through out their lives, then technically there is enough to go around. Otherwise, one who holds the resource in high demand won't share it fairly.
Simply put : Income disparity will thrive in resource hungry society where resources are held by few members. Even in self-sufficiency, if population grows then nature has to pay the price. Resources are finite for all kinds of life on earth. If one thrives some other suffers.
Anyway, now it's downvoted; wasted my time wording it.
> Why does someone always have to be in poverty in your world view?
The short answer is, "because there has always been". The longer answer is about distribution, effort, and capability for populations. There's also the issue of individuals who choose not to participate or concern themselves with their own well-being.
It's almost assured that there is uneven distribution of goods in every economic model leading to a complete breakdown of availability for some.
In an egalitarian utopian socialist/communist system, there are inadvertent gatekeepers who create an uneven distribution from corruption and opportunity cost. ie Distribution work that is hard is avoided when there's plentiful and ongoing distribution work^.
Any economic system that is not explicitly egalitarian has gatekeepers by design and you end up with uneven distribution. I don't see any way around these issues, even with automation...which has to be maintained by humans and you end up with the same issues.
^I think the USPO is an exceptional marvel as an egalitarian service which actually works, albeit by making cost/benefit choices about what areas to cover. To whit, this is a compromise that still leaves some without mail service, akin to mail-poverty.
I've been in the mountains of Yunnan recently. I have a hard time believing the Lisu have been lifted out of poverty. I did see party investments in the area, but I can't imagine many locals incomes being improved. Investments in dams might show geographic benefits, but its not reaching minority groups. The tourism investments in construction seem to be falling apart without ever getting much use.
Yes and No. I've traveled to China several times on extended visits, as recently as 2018. I would say there's an up-and-coming middle class and they've managed to eliminate some _extreme poverty_, but with a lot of asterisks.
The methods are not not great (hey the end justifies the means, right? seems to be popular mantra these days, even in the USA) and they sometimes come at great distress to human rights (forced factory staffing... but hey, your'e getting paid right?).
I don't think he does that very often, since he doesn't know the reasons. You could also try contact him directly instead of expecting him to see a random comment you left.
I mean, the Muslim 're-education' camps officially don't exist if you consider a statement coming directly from the CCP to be official. I have a hard time understanding how so many people here are either minimizing that fact or ignoring it entirely.
I don't want to discuss anything except something I know as a government sympathizer. The whole thing is more symbolic, but it is their right to celebrate. How poverty lifting work in China is that each city will have a county assigned to them, and these cities will use its resources to help. From city level, the work is then distributed to state-owned entities, each will be responsible for a village for example. Assigned communist party officials from these state company/organizations will stay in the village, oversee the project. It is a multi-year project. Some are successful, some are not. It is a hard problem. I think internet will bring more people out of poverty. The long term successes are those places with new factories/workshops, they can sell produces online or make something. There are no opportunities in some villages regardless, young people have to work somewhere else, farming is not an option for young people.
Delist first, do the actual poverty lifing later, or not. Xi and the CCP's public image is always more important, there's no way they'll let people know they failed to keep their promise.
144 comments
[ 5.7 ms ] story [ 388 ms ] threadThe average annual net income of impoverished people in these nine counties has risen to 11,487 yuan (about $1,740)
Still, it's a major achievement, even if it was achieved with some highly questionable moves - (forcibly?) relocating 2M people to cities
https://www.ntd.com/ccp-covers-up-virus-surge-in-shanghai_52... https://www.ntd.com/chinese-city-goes-on-full-lockdown-after...
Everyone can check if the hospitals are overfilled, the foreign reporters would be more than happy to say so if it were the case.
It could very well be that China chose to sweep it under the rug and has many more people dying than reported. But the number could still be perfectly average, which is not that much. And perhaps below since most of SE Asia seems to be doing very well regardless of policy. China could have 50 times the per capita death rate and would still be below average.
Certain wards are overflowing, hospitals as a whole aren't. Many if not most didn't have that much excess mortality. Not hard to cover up at all by simply not admitting people and/or providing sub-optimal care (in which case you'd have much more effective capacity).
That would create a lot of angry people who'll complain that the ward is overwhelmed, which would be counterproductive if the goal is to hide a huge case load while claiming zero local infections.
You don't need to tell anybody the coronavirus ward is full, they're not.
You make it hard to even get to a doctor, if they do you just send them home with a prescription. This illness progresses very fast. Many will simply die at home (which already happens everywhere, it would just happen in China at a much higher rate).
Those that call in an emergency you treat in a very suboptimal manner (untrained personnel, inadequate equipment etc) which gives you much more capacity. The reason wards are full in Western countries is higher standards and more regulation.
And again, none of what I have described is unprecedented or requires too much coordination. It's basically how the Chinese healthcare system already functions. By not doing much about the coronavirus and not giving local cases any press coverage, 90% of the "cover-up" is complete.
The only remotely conspiratorial part is not properly coding deaths as COVID. But then again, we already see large discrepancies in how countries code deaths for perfectly legitimate reasons.
They probably do have more cases (like all other countries do as well), but the measures are way more effective if you don't have to care about people's personal freedoms.
>satisfaction rate among locals was over 99 percent
>About 1.88 million people living in poor mountainous areas have been relocated to urban areas
>Various supporting measures have been taken to ensure that at least one person on average in each relocated household gets employed.
Reads like an Onion article.
I've been to rural China, and it tracks with the improvements I saw. But maybe that's anecdotal, do you have more insight on the matter?
If anything certain muslim regions are far from happy.
https://twitter.com/fullhomosexual/status/132880415416539136...
The downfall of the US is that we're SO CERTAIN that our way is the only right and good way, and it gives us blind spots.
lmao
It does sound like that provincial bureaucrat was getting ahead of themselves. It doesn't sound like Orwell 1984, and it's not really the heart of the story.
"Certain Muslim regions" really means only Xinjiang and the Uighurs living within (and some of the much smaller Kazakh and Kyrgyz population, too). The Muslim minority in central China has long since assimilated to the Han majority in their political opinions.
There's a reason this book: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1442256885/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b... spends so much time talking about the problems with government-supplied housing, income, jobs, education, etc ... it makes it nearly impossible to not side with whatever the gov says.
Of course they would if they can. Those are two different governments: the government-supplied job is supplied by the local government, while the surveyor is sent by the provincial or central government. Complaining to them about the local government is an opportunity to have the central government step in and rectify the issue.
Of course local governments know that as well, and to avoid having people tell on them, they use all kinds of tricks to deceive the surveyors. Depthpaper magazine published an investigative report last year https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/hXPd-mFNnnxQheR7tB64WQ on a particular case where the local government was ordered to stop trying to interfere (so their deception failed). One thing they did was to find out in advance which households would be visited, and then they handed out various goods bought in advance, to make it look like that family had been enjoying a relatively high standard of living for quite some time.
Since the central government's success rate at detecting cheating local governments is probably not that high, I expect that there are still a lot of counties that are officially above the poverty line but actually still below it.
Complaints are typically viewed by default as unpatriotic, obstructionist borderline sabotage, and only a fool would make one.
These statistics are mostly about how they define "poverty": $609 per year in this case.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jan/29/bill-g...
It is yet to be seen if China can reach the developed country status, which would require dethroning the dollar as the world reserve currency. However, just because China has been successful in the past doesn't mean it will be able to achieve this feat.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xinjiang_re-education_camps#:~...
China continues to bully its regional neighbors like Vietnam over dubious claims to the regional seas.
Now, to be fair, I'm typing this on land formerly inhabited by American Indians, in a nation with a history of lying to start wars and exploiting foreign nations for gain. But at least I am able to discuss these issues and push for changes to keep those atrocities from happening again.
Nobody has successfully pushed back on any aspect of the war on terror my entire life, including 2 different Presidents who came in saying it should be rolled back. The newest one doesn't even give it lip service.
Original title: "China delists all remaining poverty-stricken counties"
Pretty big difference there.
Take anything you read with a grain of salt.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CGTN_(TV_channel)
>takes away a lot of freedoms
pick one?
Anyone who suffers oppression, just will see these achievements as adding insult to injury.
Imagine making an account just to defend concentration camps.
Just saying.
Note: I meant this as sarcasm, if you didn’t catch my tone.
According to which law kidnappings, tortures and human organs harvesting are being performed?
Pssst.... See Irak, invasion.
https://npcobserver.com/legislation/civil-code/
Comprehensive rule-of-law for the plurality for the majority of cases is largely on the horizon. Rule-by-law will of course co-exist for signifiant state matters, but that's a typical balanced arrangement for any competent state.
[0]https://zj.zjol.com.cn/red_boat.html?id=100995604
If that wasn't enough you could trivially look up how many lawyers end up imprisoned or worse.
It's not even a bit silly to argue China has anything near a working legal system, it absolutely doesn't.
For me if these courts are exercising their judicial power legally and properly then we at least have a working civil legal system (not 'none'). There are unfair cases with international concerns but it's not unique to China. I don't think a majority of the local courts in China are malfunctioning or abusing power. If you have evidence to back your claim up I'm happy to read that.
Sounds like you don't read to many news papers by the way. You might want to check out what's going in in Hong Kong under Chinese pressure. Good demonstration of what the Chinese state thinks of independent judiciaries.
I merely want to contribute to a meaningful discussion by personal experience so I wouldn't expand to those topics (in my opinion quite sensationalised by social media). I live in Europe now and absolutely understand what the general public are interested in.
I did not link to social media, nor do I use it, so please refrain from assuming it has any influence on the point I'm making. I'm sure perfectly fine litigation has happened, it would just be foolish to count on it. Maybe you're right that with an increasingly limited issue you luck increases.
I didn't make any assumption of your information sources nor did I assert any influence of social media. It was only a general statement, not about anybody in particular. It was you who 'assumed' I didn't read any news etc. I fully respect all users' opinions here and would genuinely be interested to read any reference/articles to prove your points. I'll be surprised that the imprisoned lawyer cases were happening all the time in the lower courts.
How do you explain Poverty of India then? It doesn't suffer from one person in power.
India and China were roughly equal in population and GDP if you go back in time before the start of the British empire
Lifting that many people out of poverty is nothing sort of a miracle
Any source for your claims?
The truth:
India population in 1800: 169 million [0]
China population in 1800: 322 million (nearly double India’s)
As for GDP:
China’s GDP (PPP) per capita in 1800: $316K [1]
India’s GDP (PPP) per capita in 1800: $177K
Note this is per capita. Factoring in the population difference, China’s overall GDP (PPP) was almost 4 times that of India. Hardly “roughly equal”.
I’m using 1800 as a reference year since it’s easier to find data for it.
And GDP (PPP) in 1980 (IMF estimates): [2]
China’s GDP (PPP) in 1980: $305K
India’s GDP (PPP) in 1980: $381K
India’s GDP in 1980 actually surpassed China: 4-5 times growth compared to China! (from 1800 to 1980)
This proves the grandparent comment that “IMHO, the root of our previous poverty is arrogance and one man in power (see Mao's policy which had led nation wide famine just because he want to surpass US in a short time”.
India’s population growth nearly doubles China’s (from 1800 to now) . Not surprising that, on average, more Indians are poorer than Chinese.
[0] https://www.visualcapitalist.com/the-population-race-a-300-y...
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4-2nqd6-ZXg
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_past_and_...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_GDP_of_China
[2] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/2b/GD...
Edit: formatting
Estimated Real GDP per capita in 2011 USD (cgdppc in source) Selection of roughly comparable dates (note no chinese GDP per capita estimates from before 1661). CHINA INDIA 1600s $940(1661) $1228(1228) 1700s $686(1766) $1103(1750) 1820s $741(1820) $ 968(1821) 1900 $840 $1131 1950 $757 $1417 1980 $1690 $1143 2000 $4071 $2003
I wouldn't take this as gospel. These are estimates put together from patchy historical sources and probably widely innacurate. But it seems to indicate that India was ahead in population for much of the last two thousand years. And ahead of China in GDP per capita for most of the past 400 years.
Source Maddison project, University of Gronigen [0] https://www.rug.nl/ggdc/historicaldevelopment/maddison/relea...
if that was the case there'd be fewer poor countries on the planet. The Chinese government has made many mistakes, a lot of them quite terrible, but a lot of progress over the last few decades also is the result of successful and active governance. Statecraft is not something that just happens or that is trivial.
Even just creating an open environment and the sort of conditions that let hardworking people do what they want is difficult, successful ecosystems are built, they don't happen because everyone at the party office just drops their suitcase and goes home.
And you forget to say that the amount of people verged into absolute poverty by CPC is also the biggest shame of human history.
Nowhere else in history few hundred million people verge forcibly degraded back into stone age out of somewhat moderately industrialised economy.
Chinese people have nothing to thank communists for. Any opinion differing from this is preposterous.
After all, the criminal British Empire made their fortunes, by shoving opium down the throats of the Chinese for 100 freaking years!
And then Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who never had a job his entire life, and just one day became the American president, well, where did his family get their money from? Yes, that’s right. Opium. The Delano’s were also the biggest American drug smugglers during the opium era. And yes, when the Americans were talking about trading success with the Asians, they were specifically referring to opium, but they were too ashamed to admit it.
The Chinese opium era was the greatest theft, and the greatest transfer of wealth in human history!
Google it man. Educate yourself about the sins of the British and American empires.
At least after the CPC and Mao came into power in China, they finally eliminated the opium scourge, and kicked out the British dickheads from their country (except for Hong Kong).
And then, he killed, and starved 60m of his countrymen.
How many English killed, and how many Mao killed.
I feel, you are under influence of Maoism.
I feel, you are under the influence of moronism. You just cannot see the bigger picture and connect the dots. Even though it’s right in front of your face.
If the British and Americans did not do what they did in the 1840s, then do you think someone like Mao would’ve come into power in the 1900s?
Were you also aware that China was under heavy sanctions from the United States, Australia, and the rest of the world after the CPC came into power? They could not buy food from abroad, since the white countries wanted to starve them to death. They could not trade to make money from their commodities. The ultimate goal of the white western nations was to starve China (but let’s not talk about any of that, because that would disrupt our brainwashing of the masses).
The British subsequently killed more people than Mao, because they set into motion a series of disastrous events.
Did you even realize China had a civil war in the 1850s, because of the British?
But of course, let’s ignore everything else, and focus our attention on Mao, since he’s an easy target. And forget about everything else that led up to him.
> Under the commune system, agricultural and political decisions were decentralized, and ideological purity rather than expertise was emphasized. The peasants were organized into brigade teams, and communal kitchens were established so that women could be freed for work. The program was implemented with such haste by overzealous cadres that implements were often melted to make steel in the backyard furnaces, and many farm animals were slaughtered by discontented peasants. These errors in implementation were made worse by a series of natural disasters and the withdrawal of Soviet support. The inefficiency of the communes and the large-scale diversion of farm labour into small-scale industry disrupted China's agriculture seriously, and three consecutive years of natural calamities added to what quickly turned into a national disaster; in all, about 20 million people were estimated to have died of starvation between 1959 and 1962.
He’s accusing anyone that doesn’t see things the same way he does, as being brainwashed.
And ceded 1m+ square kilometres to USSR.
> The generation he fucked over have nothing to be thankful for, but the generations that came after does, 30% bad is going to shrink with each year as Chinese comprehensive power grows
Unless the country is not steered back into the abyss, which is seemingly is the case. They blew it all.
> China to credibly deter against external forces, situation is still far from good for many, but it's better than what most countries could accomplish, and considering sheer Chinese scale, many Chinese are thankful for the outcome.
Every Chinese citizen I know, hates the party with deep, deep passion, and that includes not so few party members themselves.
> CCP build modern China to credibly deter against external forces
You have to really turn on the TV.
I feel, you are in denial of objective reality under influence of virulent Xiism.
>hates the party with deep, deep passion
I mean... what else is new? Not many countries with widespread support for their government, especially now, times are hard for almost everyone, everywhere. Citizens in multiparty systems hate their politicians too, they just also happen to hate rival parties more. Modernity + capitalism is stressful, personally preferable stress than being subsistence farmers. Maybe some prefer if China was contained and stagnant in an agrarian society. Most of my extended family hates the CCP, lost everything during cultural revolution. Some got fucked again during Xi's corruption crack downs. More lament at their kids future because competing in the world's largest country isn't easy. Most of them could also sell their tier1 city condos and retire comfortably in any western country as millionaires. These are people who benefited enormously from the system. People aren't rational.
>virulent Xiism
I wasn't a fan of Xi, but he inherited unfavorable geopolitical conditions and in retrospect seized the right opportunities. US pivoted to Asia before him, the relationship was always going to devolve into competition. Hide and bide was on last legs, and Trump didn't help with setting new truculence. They managed situation OK considering how this wildcard US admin was stacked with China Hawks. Pompeo isn't sailing carriers groups through the Taiwan Strait anymore, and the weapons sales are a pittance compared to the 90s.
>They blew it all
US anxiety and to rise of China threat was always going to be triggered by a combination of Chinese economy eclipsing US and scale of Chinese military buildup commiserate with 14T economy. It's inevitable. But economy and military reformed are basically at a level of appropriate competitiveness and regional deterrence to address shifting US foreign policy. Maybe another few years would help with the IC / turbojet situation, but US was cracking down on MIC2025 since Obama. 20 years ago, Chinese hated the government, worshipped the west, and couldn't dream of a world outside of western hegemony. Now they're somewhat confident about the government and recognize the west are not untouchable. Hate + confidence is an improvement. I didn't think I'd live to see the day where comfy Chinese diaspora in the west or international students want to go back, but those conversations are happening.
When the CPC took power, the GDP per capita was 54 USD in 1952 (earliest date in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_GDP_of_China).
If you chose your words carefully and still state "forcibly degraded back into stone age out of somewhat moderately industrialised economy", one would expect the GDP per capita to revert to 1 USD. In reality, GDP per capita grew to 89 USD in 1960, at its worst reverted to 71 USD during the height of the famine and recovered 3 years later to 98 USD.
And millions of very real starving Chinese did no need your data.
Statistical data of every Eastern bloc country was faked, and the data you cite is fake.
How much has the one child policy contributed to this?
Economics is a zero-sum-game; if they lifted everyone in China out of poverty, then poverty is exported to other countries or the nature paid all the costs.
Edit:
Nature is a silent sufferer in the economics. It acted as cushion to our misadventures, a-bomb(wars), oil-spills, co2 & other gases, industrial wastes, nuclear wastes.
For a person to become rich, they have to earn profit dishonestly; if profit is shared equally nobody is richer. Somebody is getting short end of the stick to make someone else richer.
If everyone is self-sufficient through out their lives, then technically there is enough to go around. Otherwise, one who holds the resource in high demand won't share it fairly.
Simply put : Income disparity will thrive in resource hungry society where resources are held by few members. Even in self-sufficiency, if population grows then nature has to pay the price. Resources are finite for all kinds of life on earth. If one thrives some other suffers.
Anyway, now it's downvoted; wasted my time wording it.
The short answer is, "because there has always been". The longer answer is about distribution, effort, and capability for populations. There's also the issue of individuals who choose not to participate or concern themselves with their own well-being.
It's almost assured that there is uneven distribution of goods in every economic model leading to a complete breakdown of availability for some.
In an egalitarian utopian socialist/communist system, there are inadvertent gatekeepers who create an uneven distribution from corruption and opportunity cost. ie Distribution work that is hard is avoided when there's plentiful and ongoing distribution work^.
Any economic system that is not explicitly egalitarian has gatekeepers by design and you end up with uneven distribution. I don't see any way around these issues, even with automation...which has to be maintained by humans and you end up with the same issues.
^I think the USPO is an exceptional marvel as an egalitarian service which actually works, albeit by making cost/benefit choices about what areas to cover. To whit, this is a compromise that still leaves some without mail service, akin to mail-poverty.
The methods are not not great (hey the end justifies the means, right? seems to be popular mantra these days, even in the USA) and they sometimes come at great distress to human rights (forced factory staffing... but hey, your'e getting paid right?).
Yes. It is the story of the century and a massive achievement. Testament to what good government can do.
I've seen more than once people "invoke" dang by simply drooping his name and then voila! he instantly appeared.
Governors were given poverty targets that had to be met, so they just sent in reports that everything was good to avoid losing their jobs.
The reality is that:
1) Many peasants (ie. half the Chinese population) don't have enough money to plant their next crop
2) And thanks to the natural disasters in 2020, they never will.
From Xi's Maoist perspective, that's a good thing - less mouths to feed.
Oh, and HN posters: stop being useful idiots:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Useful_idiot
As for concentration camp: [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ouobrLVpKIQ