Your last comment was talking about people eating rats and bug and living without healthcare…if that doesn’t describe a hellhole, I don’t know what does.

But in this comment you’ve changed gears and everything seems reasonable…and I’m on board.

Thank you very much for this response. I must admit, I’m in over my head when it comes to deep engagement on this issue. I have several friends in the regions I listed who are of middle to low socio-economic importance in their respective areas, and I keep in touch with them almost exclusively online.

I understand and appreciate your perspective and thank you very much for sharing it with me. I’ll definitely be considering it when I think about this in the future.

My eyes are so bad I can’t tell which way either of those words is spelled.

The US isn’t even in the top 10 most desirable counties for migrants (as a proportion of their population).

Nobody should use GDP to measure the health of a region…all it really measures is how many rich people are present.

Also…how can you compare apples to oranges like that? Income is half of the equation. Are you aware of the corresponding cost of living/spending power over there? You have to know it’s significantly more affordable.

It’s dangerous to censor, certainly…but it’s also dangerous to base your opinion on YouTube videos that surely have their own agenda and lack of breadth.

China is neither the poverty void this article presents, nor is it the hellhole you’re suggesting it is. It’s also a fact that China raised the vast majority out of its citizens out of poverty…and used that boom to make it sustainable.

That’s not true. I mean…I’m sure you’re being hyperbolic, and there’s certainly discontent in a 1 party system…but I have some exposure to ordinary Chinese people as well as regular people in Hong Kong and Taiwan, and the sentiment is mixed, at worse.

Right…but you can’t swing from one extreme (zero poverty) to the other (hundreds of millions living like it’s the Great Depression). Neither are true.

It should be noted that poverty in China isn’t the same as poverty in the USA, ie when you adjust for wages v cost of living it doesn’t tell us much, because the systems are incompatible. All those people in China making below $1.90 US a day (or whatever your metric is) aren’t in the same boat they’d be in in the US, and vice versa.

But all of this ignores the topic of the post: China did indeed raise virtually all of its citizens out of poverty, and the US didn’t. But it’s really weird to just throw that factoid out there without acknowledging that China did it at the expense of the US.

China, in large part, raised people out of poverty at the expense of the so-called “west”…so it’s no mystery that the US was unable to do the same. The wests’ corporations needed cheap labour, and China was happy to accept the jobs. We all know this. Trump got elected because he was the first to overtly acknowledge that reality and propose a solution. Now, his “solution” will only exasperate the problem because he’s ultimately a corrupt fascist…but there’s a lesson there that hasn’t been learned yet.