User Asks: Why Is There No Poverty in China?

China and Poverty: Lots of LEDs and Peppers for Three Cents

The debate begins with the premise that China has no poverty. Against this idea, one participant argues that the country produces more new billionaires than any other. The two facts coexist on the same thread. The problem is what happens when you look down at the ground.

Is There Poverty in China? What is Seen on the Stairs of Guanzu

Yes, there is, responds another participant. This refers to a video of farmers climbing the Guanzu stairs with two baskets of 50 kilos hanging from a pole on their shoulders, selling peppers for three cents. That would be the other country—the one that doesn't antiestéticature in the narrative that poverty no longer exists.

The scene circulates as a counterexample to the official version and as a reminder that a statistical threshold is not the same thing as a dignified life. Also circulating, among the cited sources, is a link to the World Socialist Web Site, which one of the participants uses to refute what they call propaganda regarding Chinese success. Each person draws their own conclusion.

The Gap Between the Peasant and the TikTok Owner

One participant summarizes the contradiction by pointing to the country with the largest wage gap between a peasant and a TikTok owner. According to that same intervention, it is the country boasting of having overcome poverty. There is no figure to support the comparison, but the image serves as a thermometer.

The same participant adds that there are more new billionaires than in any other country. The defender of the model, conversely, argues that a national worker will never lack employment because Chinese entrepreneurs are not allowed to import labor. Another participant summarizes this by saying that misery hides beneath millions of LED lights.

Rice, the Girl, and the Late Donation

One participant recalls a case from around 2018: an orphaned minor who cared for her younger brother. She ate rice, and little of it, so that the child could eat. She lost her hair, her nails and teeth became damaged, and she suffered heart failure due to lack of protein, according to her account. Once hospitalized, she tried to finance the operation with a collection and said she didn't want to die from being poor. When the news reached Europe, she had died and her brother was in an orphanage.

It is a case, not a statistic. But cases are exactly what doesn't fit into a headline that declares poverty solved. And they are also what makes the discussion about poverty in China more uncomfortable than a macro data point.

A country can have new billionaires and, simultaneously, farmers climbing stairs with 50 kilos hanging from a pole, according to the account in the thread. The question is not whether China has grown: no one disputes that. It is how much of that growth reaches those climbing the stairs. And that, for now, is not measured in LED lights.