Okay not getting into the welfare right or wrong argument, that being said what the hell do you expect? I mean what the cost of living in China compared to the U.S., a sack of rice and a couple of pigs and you’re done with a Chinese family for the year. Anybody that tries to compare dollars this way is so disingenuous as to demand ridicule for their argument.
~Okay not getting into the welfare right or wrong argument, that being said what the hell do you expect? I mean what the cost of living in China compared to the U.S., a sack of rice and a couple of pigs and you’re done with a Chinese family for the year. Anybody that tries to compare dollars this way is so disingenuous as to demand ridicule for their argument.~
You got it conceptually correct but there is some formal misunderstanding on what is modern China.
There are basically two countries, rural which is a 3rd world and shrinking, and urban which is quite advanced and expanding.
If we are talking about the latter, living standards are much closer to that you expect to see in the west and it won’t be exaggeration to say, considering a living cost differences you mentioned, that with a blue collar industrial wage of say $8,000 a year, a lower middle class Chicom person can have pretty compatible material wealth to urban American making $50,000.
Note, that said 5 to 10 thousand income is not near UN’s 3rd world ‘under dollar a day’ poverty line, even without adjusting to cost difference.
And here we are talking about lower side of a food chain only.
At the same time China has more families worth $100,000 and more than neighboring Russia has families at all.
China is a growing middle class society and the more middle class the more demand for freedom and rule of law in my opinion.
Given that they would be able to sustain their economic growth we can expect China to outflank the ‘free world’ not only in terms of economic power which is already a reality.
Of course there are many factors in play, probably too many to bring into this discussion, so we shall see.