"This is not to congratulate China for its authoritarian government, for its repression of minorities or for the iron fist it deploys against any form of dissent."
As always, there has to be some bit about how repressive China is.
this post was submitted on 23 Nov 2025
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China violently repressing people out of poverty against their will.
for its repression of minorities
There always has to be some "hidden cost" in the form of projection in the mind of the average Westoid.
Amazing as China's progress is, doesn't its income equality look pretty similar to the US'? Or have been given duff graphs?
While inequality in China is still high, you have to look beyond a single metric to make a meaningful comparison.
90% of families in the country own their home giving China one of the highest home ownership rates in the world. What’s more is that 80% of these homes are owned outright, without mortgages or any other leans. https://www.forbes.com/sites/wadeshepard/2016/03/30/how-people-in-china-afford-their-outrageously-expensive-homes
The real (inflation-adjusted) incomes of the poorest half of the Chinese population increased by more than four hundred percent from 1978 to 2015, while real incomes of the poorest half of the US population actually declined during the same time period. https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w23119/w23119.pdf
Real wage (i.e. the wage adjusted for the prices you pay) has gone up 4x in the past 25 years, more than any other country. This is staggering considering it’s the most populous country on the planet. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cw8SvK0E5dI
From 1978 to 2000, the number of people in China living on under $1/day fell by 300 million, reversing a global trend of rising poverty that had lasted half a century (i.e. if China were excluded, the world’s total poverty population would have risen) https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/China%E2%80%99s-Economic-Growth-and-Poverty-Reduction-Angang-Linlin/c883fc7496aa1b920b05dc2546b880f54b9c77a4
From 2010 to 2019 (the most recent period for which uninterrupted data is available), the income of the poorest 20% in China increased even as a share of total income. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SI.DST.FRST.20?end=2019&%3Blocations=CN&%3Bstart=2008
Chinese household savings hit another record high in 2024 https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/stock-market-today-dow-jones-bank-earnings-01-12-2024/card/chinese-household-savings-hit-another-record-high-xqyky00IsIe357rtJb4j
Student debt in China is virtually non-existent because education is not run for profit. https://www.forbes.com/sites/jlim/2016/08/29/why-china-doesnt-have-a-student-debt-problem/
The typical Chinese adult is now richer than the typical European adult https://www.businessinsider.com/typical-chinese-adult-now-richer-than-europeans-wealth-report-finds-2022-9
People in China also enjoy high levels of social mobility than those living in US https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/11/18/world/asia/china-social-mobility.html
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
Going by GINI coefficient, they're pretty similar, but the US is worse. US is around 39-41 while China is around 35-37 (0 is perfect equality, so lower is better). China ranks around 100th in the world while the US is around 140th. Different organizations measure this with slightly different data and methodology so there's no objective answer, but the US is definitely worse than China while both are worse than the global by-country average. China's income inequality has substantially decreased over the last 15 years and all income groups have had substantial increases in their wealth. In the US, inequality has gotten substantially worse since 2016.
Yes China is still pretty unequal despite poverty alleviation. For example: in 2020 (when China eliminated extreme poverty), then-Premier Li Keqiang still stated that there were 600 million people earning less than 1000 RMB per month (~136 USD with today's conversation rates).
Regarding income inequality in China: this is almost unavoidable in market-based economies. Paul Cockshott has an amazing video talking about an economic paper by a post-Soviet economist relating the salary distribution in capitalist economies to the Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution (a distribution commonly appearing in physics, for example in the speed distribution of particles in a gas). For incomes in the working class, this works almost perfectly, whereas for the top 1% this deviates heavily from Maxwell-Boltzmann, indicating a change in the way these people make money: workers trade their labor for a wage for earnings, whereas capitalists earn money from revalorization of capital.
The implication that salaries obey the Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution is extremely powerful: the salary distribution for 99% of people in market economies maximizes entropy. This implies that the only way to avoid these levels of inequality is to abandon market determination of salaries.
For anyone interested, Cockshott's video is called "Thermodynamics of money and capital".
That was an interesting video, thank you for linking it! I hadn't checked out Cockshott before, despite having heard of him from time to time.
I'm really glad you liked it. Cockshott is a wonderful Marxian economist, and I haven't seen anybody else advocate for such an experimental view on economics. His papers and videos on the labour theory of value and the empirical evidence supporting it have solidified my views on Marxism immensely.
Be warned: he's an old fart with old fart caveats. His videos are mostly PowerPoint presentations, the audio is often too faint, and I've heard him called a TERF on hexbear (he's Scottish so I believe that), and he has also some weird views on immigration. That said, the content of 95+% of his videos is brainworm-free and really solid.
I'm here for The Guardian's Maoist arc
the U.S. has created more poverty than anything else in the last 25 years