this post was submitted on 19 Jan 2025
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The average Chinese income is a useless number when you consider that they have spent the last 75 years pulling 800 million people out of devastating poverty into "just above the poverty line". You can't use average income for anything useful with a population that massive and with income inequality that spans literal peasant farmers through business tycoons.
You can easily figure out that your numbers are meaningless, even if they are accurate, because a larger percentage of Chinese citizens own their own homes when compared to the USA. If your numbers were meaningful, then they would be predictive. Unfortunately, just because your numbers are accurate doesn't make them predictive. The USA has a lower home ownership rate per capita despite the averages working out to such a massive difference in the other direction, hence, your choice of aggregate is the problem here.
90% of people in China own their homes and 80% of them own them outright without mortgages of any kind.
Because of this, and the extremely low cost of living expenses, it is entirely possible to save for your own children's home purchase, which is pretty much what happens in China. Healthcare is free, generational homes provide elder care. Tuition at university costs are extremely low. There are no property taxes. A one-person income in China, therefore, can be saved in a way that is completely unimaginable in the USA. A family doesn't even need to save for college tuition because it's just that cheap. The only thing to save for, then, is buying a home for your child when they come of age.
For the well off, that means buying it outright immediately. For the less well off, that means the child graduates from schooling, enters the work force, lives at home, saves their own money, and they pool the money with their parents and their grandparents to buy a home. Maybe they become part of the 20% that take out a loan to do it, but again, there are no other costs that can bankrupt your family, unlike the USA.
It will shock everyone in the USA if not only they knew how expensive housing prices were but also that a full 90% of people in China own their homes because they can afford it, that 80% are debt free, and that there are no property taxes.
And that this is true despite the income levels being so low!
There's a reason why so many Chinese are immigrating to the United States. China is no utopia.
LOL, lmao even
China has a terrible starting point because it was an agrarian society with 90% of it's population living on a dollar a year prior to the revolution. That's because it was under a century of subjugation by European imperialists who forced China at gun point to continue allowing European drug dealers to destroy the country with opium getting 60% of the population addicted. They took over the port cities and administered tarrifs on behalf of China and took all the proceeds. And the Japanese invaded and occupied them.
Then they had a devastating civil war that put the CPC in power, but the Europeans refused to allow total victory so they kept Hong Kong and they blockaded the island of Taiwan in order to protect their fascist puppet who spent the next several decades prosecuting the White Terror under their protection.
Then the party tried to rapidly industrialize and solve their cyclical famines problem, but they had to do it without the benefit of any knowledgeable workers, any equipment, any chemical production, any Western support, and any research corpus for their climates and their crops. And they made bad decisions that had negative consequences that they learned from adapted to.
The idea that children don't move out of their parental homes is absolutely not true. You're going to have to get a source for that.
And the idea that so many Chinese people are dissatisfied with their country is belied by the Harvard 15-year study that showed 95.5% of people approved of the party and the national government and its officials.
Utopia is never the standard we use, and no one is claiming utopia. But if you're going to set the standard at UTOPIA, China is far closer to utopia than the USA.
China also had a major drought during the Great Leap Forward. They would have had a hard time even if they hadn't collectivized their agriculture.