2y ago

China Tries To Censor Data About Nearly 1 Billion People in Poverty

www.newsweek.com

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.

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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.
- This was my first thought. Seems unlikely. I’d see this just as likely being propaganda.
  
  deleted
- Mao-like administrations tend to do that. Undoing whatever progress Deng fulfilled
- How do you think they're detecting what to sensor, how are they censoring it?
  
  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.
  it does not belong to a tech community.
Why the fuck am I now sitting here reading US economic/political propaganda on the technology feed? GTFO
- 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.
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.
- the bot posting this isn't really giving a shit probably
  
  Mods, on the other hand, should.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
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!
There is no poverty in Ba Sing Se.
- Yeah... Avatar was rather spot on with the depiction of China-like Ba Sing Se.

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