China Tries To Censor Data About Nearly 1 Billion People in Poverty
China Tries To Censor Data About Nearly 1 Billion People in Poverty
Chinese government censors tried to control discussions about the country's economy this week.
China Tries To Censor Data About Nearly 1 Billion People in Poverty::Chinese government censors tried to control discussions about the country's economy this week.
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1 billion people in China living in poverty?? I find that almost hard to believe that’s ~66% of their population
If it's propaganda it's coming from within
"In his article for the business outlet Yicai, Li cited data from a 2021 research paper by the China Institute of Income Distribution at Beijing Normal University, which placed the number of people living on less than 2,000 yuan a month at 964 million, or nearly 70 percent of the population."
Most certainly easy to believe. China is not that far off from DPRK anymore. Look at what they did during covid (welding people in their apartments, killing all pets, arresting people for curfew violations, etc). Look at their typical workday (14x6) and wage (a few $/day). How do think we get cheap products like $25 microwaves and $15 coffee makers. CCP wants a slave population, not citizens.
Holy shit! There's not a single bit of the Official Narrative™ that you didn't swallow there, Sparky, is there?
- Your view of how COVID-19 mitigation worked is skewed by breathless, click-baiting media reports (known by most as "lies") made by people who could not, at a very deep, very primal level, admit to even themselves that brown-skinned people outperformed white-skinned people by orders of magnitude and made up shit to placate their humiliation.
- Typical workdays are not 14×6. Hell the places that are counted abusive here are "996" shops: which is 9AM-9PM, 6 days per week. And those are getting cracked down on. (Though not at a high enough rate for my tastes.) More normal is like my employer: 8AM-5:30PM, five days a week 1 hour for lunch. In manufacturing this can get a bit more abusive where the 8.5-hour workday (after 1 hour removed for lunch) is closer to 10 hours, and in service industries it's a shorter workday, but often 6 days per week. 14×6 is fantasy, however.
- The average wage here in Wuhan is approximately 1500RMB/mo which is about US$200/mo. This sounds absurdly low, but once you factor in the huge cost of living disparities, people living on 1500RMB/mo have enough money left over to actually be able to afford home ownership. (Are they great homes? No. But neither are they living in squalor at that wage.) The average wage in the countryside is lower, to be fair, and a lot of people (but not the majority by any means) in the countryside (especially the elderly) do live in poverty ... but ... ah ... hot news flash: China is a fully-urbanized country and rural population is nowhere near one billion.
The CPC (note the correct initialization: Use of "CCP" is an instant ignoramus detector) is by no means a good government and the people in it are not good people at any level above the community cadre level (and most community cadres aren't great either), but they're not cartoon villains like, say, Republicans in the USA. They're vile authoritarians, but they're in it for the long haul and they know (from reading Chinese history alone, not to mention from examples around the world) that authoritarians who get too abusive tend to get lightly killed. This contrasts with, say, the USA's Republicans who have absolutely no sense of history (that would require education, see) and are working their level best for upheaval and destruction because they're too stupid to understand the consequences of that. (Don't like that characterization? Well, turn-around's a bitch, ain't it?)
Stop being an ignoramus and start questioning the pabulum narrative you've been spoon-fed.
TIL Chinese people are "brown skinned".
I assume they mean from the point of view of the people in the media they're criticizing.
I know right, we are yellow or fair
Kind of ironic that they accuse everybody else of being racist, while ignoring the fact Chinese people are not a racial monolith, and there is racism within China
I'm in China as well and you're talking out of your ass, or arrived post-covid.
I've experienced lockdowns, pet killings and welded doors; know plenty of 996 companies, and the local salaries are garbage.
I arrived in China 2001.
I experienced the harshest and largest lockdown in all of history: Wuhan, January 23rd, 2020. A real lockdown, not the cosplay bullshit you experienced outside of China. (Yes, this is me saying you've never fucking set foot in the country.)
The rest you're just flat-out lying about. Sorry, Sparky. Did pet killings happen? Yes. They were not the mass shit that the press you're so obviously reciting acts like they were. Did some doors get welded? Yes. But nowhere near you and, again, nowhere near in the masses the press you're basing your lies on made it seem like. The local salaries are garbage iff you're a fuckwit sitting in the west applying western prices to Chinese salaries. (Which, naturally, you are, good little fuckwit liar that you are.) And you've changed your tune from 14 hours to 12 hours really fucking quickly there, Sparky, not to mention using the proper slang only after I gave it to you.
So yeah, you're just a west-dwelling fuckwit lying about being here. Go toddle off in your China Watcher corners and play with the rest of the intellectual children you belong with. There's a good boy.
LOL. Ok champ. You're just the sorry twat I thought I left behind on reddit, so I'll withdraw from this exchange.
Bro I hate to break it to you but there's way more CCP apologist tankies on Lemmy than Reddit. That you won't escape by coming here.
Yep but luckily most of them stick to instances that I can fully ignore.
Either way I find it funny that the same anti westerners who say China is fair to its workers, are the same ones who always mention that my phone is made by slaves. Sometimes in the same discussion.
Bruh. Are you smoking crack?
Your view of how COVID-19 mitigation worked is skewed by breathless, click-baiting media reports (known by most as “lies”) made by people who could not, at a very deep, very primal level, admit to even themselves that brown-skinned people outperformed white-skinned people by orders of magnitude and made up shit to placate their humiliation.
What are you even talking about?
The CPC (note the correct initialization...)
I like the use of CCP, as hyper authoritarians can't help but appear to "correct" them. (This trick also works for Nazis!)
I will take your advice though and start questioning your narrative, starting with a request for sources on every claim you've made.
Wow, a real, live tankie!
The CPC […] is by no means a good government and the people in it are not good people at any level above the community cadre level […]
They’re vile authoritarians […]
Do you actually fucking READ before reacting you utter fuckwit?!
Talking with Americans is like talking with ADHD-addled toddlers for fuck's sake!
I mean
A: you're an asshole, even if you had a point.
B: your whole argument is an appeal to your own authority and a dismissal of anyone who disagrees with you as an idiot.
And C:
You spent the whole comment praising China and dismissing criticisms in specific details. Then tacked a few vague complaints that noone would disagree with on in the end. This is a very common tactic used to make it look like you haven't "taken sides".
Wow, a real, live, tankie!
I was in China during the pandemic. In 2022 everyone got COVID. Literally everyone in every big city.
So they should have opened up after omega became the dominant variant. No point in locking people down when they lost anyway.
It was a good response in the beginning, but they doubled down on it for three years
I was in China during the pandemic. In 2022 everyone got COVID. Literally everyone in every big city.
No you weren't and no they didn't.
In motherfucking WUHAN, when "let 'er rip" opened up, about a third of the people got COVID-19. (Source: It's where I've lived since 2003; lived in Jiujiang before that.)
But go ahead and lie about shit you clearly know nothing about. Your China Watcher friends will give you handjobs for it.
You need to relax. You can just explain your points without calling people fuckwits etc.
They stopped tracking cases in December, so how do you know it's one third?
They literally told us to stay at home and not go to the hospital even if we have it
This was my first thought. Seems unlikely. I’d see this just as likely being propaganda.
Thank goodness Xi managed to suppress that horrible propaganda created by the evil Western... I mean Chinese financial company that reported on their research.
We need to trust more reliable sources with less conflict of interest, like the World Bank.
That's because it's being applied to Western standards. China spends a crazy amount of money on social welfare and government assistance. Minimum wage is around or less than 2000 Yuan a month around the country, yes. But, that's completely ignoring currency exchange rates and cost of living.
Cost of living in Shanghai and Beijing are around 4,500 Yuan. Which means a couple or two roommates can live on minimum wage in the biggest cities. Compare that to minimum wage and cost of living in New York City or LA which is $1,280 a month, costing $4,300 and 1,342 a month, costing $5,576 respectively.
Tldr: how much money you make is only relevant when compared to your cost of living. It's not hard to live in China on $300 a month.
So by relative purchasing power, why would China want to censor information if it didn't actually put them in a negative light?
Well I think this article and comment section is a clear indication of the power of this information when used for propaganda.
"Saving face" is a big thing in their culture, as well as in other Asian cultures.
Mao-like administrations tend to do that. Undoing whatever progress Deng fulfilled