In the span of a single generation, China accomplished something the world had never seen before: it lifted approximately 800 million people out of extreme poverty.
Rewind to 1981. Nearly 9 in 10 people in China, close to 90% of the population, were living in extreme poverty by international standards. Rural communities across the country faced chronic hunger, minimal infrastructure, and almost no access to basic services.
Fast forward to today, and that reality has been transformed. Extreme poverty, as measured by international benchmarks, has effectively been eliminated in China. Hundreds of millions of families who once struggled for basic subsistence now belong to a middle class that didn’t exist at that scale anywhere in the world before. China is now home to the largest middle class on the planet.
This transformation touched nearly every part of Chinese society: massive investment in infrastructure, industrialization that pulled hundreds of millions from agriculture into manufacturing and services, expansion of education and healthcare access, and a sustained, decades-long push connecting rural areas to the broader economy.
To put the scale in perspective, 800 million people are more than double the entire population of the United States. It’s roughly 10% of all people alive on Earth today. No country in history has moved that many people out of poverty that fast.
Whatever one thinks about China’s political system, this is a development achievement worth understanding, one of the defining economic stories of the last fifty years.
Courtesy: Ashfin Rattansi Via X
