>>64009471
You're actually a bit off. China probably has about 250ish million citizens who live in a relatively first world. The rest live in Latin America or central Asian tier poverty. It's certainly not as rich as they want the world to believe, but they're also not quite in extreme, Africa tier poverty anymore either.They actually have a semblance of a market, and could have been able to use it a lot better, but the CCP just do a shit job with economics. This is made worse because Xi has a hard on for Orthodox Marxist theory, and was originally planning to have started the war with the US back in 2022 before the lack of a full American pivot after Ukraine gave him cold feet, so all their central planning was off (don't ask me how I know this).

You can tell that Xi is really worried about his economy because he rehabilitated Jack Ma and went as far as to shake his hand on camera. This is a massive loss of face and shows how badly the long term issues run with internal trust after corona. The entire economic planning conference the photo was from was about getting the average Chinaman to spend any money at all again. From what I hear from the mainlanders I know, lockdown was worse than we like to think. Less so because of the orwellian bullshit, the Chinese are used to that. But because basically every single thing that the local party bosses could control due to the shutdowns turned into an opportunity to collect bribes and give friends contracts. Everyone is saving all their money and trying to get it out of the country as fast as possible.

China is a mess, just not quite the kind you seem to think it is.