Only because they redefined the definition of poverty in rural areas to be around $2.30 a day (inflation adjusted). The medium daily income in major cities like Shanghai is $33 a day (inflation adjusted).

Obviously living rurally is a lot cheaper, but this difference is _massive_. We're talking a 14x difference in daily income.

With China, you always have to look deeper than the surface level reports. Just like you would anywhere else, but particularly with China because faking it is accepted as long as it saves face.

That's not a redefinition: when I was a kid, the definition of abject/extreme poverty was $1/day — inflation adjusted, that's the same amount.

Also, when I was I was born the entire country of China had a GDP/capita of about $6.10/day in 2011 dollars: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/gdp-per-capita-maddison-p...

When it comes to the distribution, the best I know how to reach for is the Gini coefficient, on which measure China is better than the USA and worse than Germany: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/economic-inequality-gini-...

There's also this chart, but I don't know what search term I would use to describe it: https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/poverty-explorer?Indica... (note this chart is in 2021 dollars, the first one is in 2011 dollars)