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.
"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.
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.
if such a thing is happening, the article utterly fails to address the technologies they are using to censor this. it just mentions some disabled hashtags.
I feel like Technology community is overused for unrelated topics in Lemmy. This article for example should belong to a community like worldnews news or something in that nature.
Internet censors in China worked around the clock this week to suppress online discussions about poverty in the country after an economist revealed nearly 1 billion people were living off less than $300 a month.
On Weibo, searches for the now disabled hashtag returned a notice reading: "In accordance with relevant laws, regulations and policies, the content of this topic cannot be displayed."
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.
Li nonetheless concluded that competent government leadership could enable further economic growth, possibly doubling China's GDP by 2035.
"Although 40 years of reform and opening up have greatly improved the country's comprehensive strength and level of national income, as of today, the fact that we have a large population, few resources and very uneven development is still obvious, and a considerable number of residents are still close to the poverty line," Wang and Meng wrote.
At the end of 2020, China's President Xi declared a "complete victory" over absolute poverty in the country, which Beijing defines as living off 2,300 yuan a year.
The original article contains 579 words, the summary contains 217 words. Saved 63%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
I haven't looked since 2021 but I was under the impression that poverty alleviation in China had been remarkable and almost single-handedly responsible for making it look like the UN hit the Millennium Development Goals or whatever they were called. Maybe it's a matter of degree, and people are still poor but not ultra poor?
It would be wise to keep the exchange rates and purchasing power in mind. A dollar in America doesn't get you an equal amount of goods as a dollar's worth of yuan in China could get you. That being said, from what I gather, most people in China live on an income that is under 2000 yuan a month, and the rest of their income is subsidized with social assistance. Even so, that's not a great long term economic strategy if people's basic income isn't enough to live on.
Yeah, a couple of decades ago China was a miracle as western institutions repeatedly redefined the poverty threshold to make global poverty look like it was improving. Back then it was touting the power of the free market, with most of the gains being in China. Now that they want conflict with China, those numbers are no longer good enough. I'm not saying China doesn't have a poverty problem, I'm just saying this is illustrative of propaganda changing the narrative.
It's no secret that the Chinese economy is faltering. How many of their "too big to fail" corps have gone tits up in the past 2 years? We've all seen the videos of people struggling to even afford living in cages. Also, calling it propaganda when you have no data to back up or refute the claims made in the article just makes you look like a tankie.