The 500M who live on $1k/month is a point of pride for the CCP; it's one of the legitimizers (probably the primary one) for its rule. China from 1980 onwards has produced the largest and most rapid wealth generation process in history.
Now, you can come up with counterfactuals about why it would have happened anyway, and that's a pretty reasonable position to take. But acting like the $1k/month figure is somehow damning of the CCP totally misunderstands the domestic situation in China.
Now, you can come up with counterfactuals about why it would have happened anyway, and that's a pretty reasonable position to take. But acting like the $1k/month figure is somehow damning of the CCP totally misunderstands the domestic situation in China.