OC
[OC] China reduced extreme poverty fast, but Indonesia hasn’t been far behind
China is often the poster child for rapid reductions in poverty, and for good reason. In the early 1980s, over 90% of its population lived in extreme poverty, but by the early 2020s, that number had dropped to nearly zero.
Some might assume that China is the only reason why global extreme poverty has declined. But that’s wrong: many countries have seen dramatic reductions in poverty, too. Indonesia is one clear example; it’s shown alongside China on the chart.
In 1984, 86% of Indonesians lived on less than $3 per day. By 2025, this had fallen to less than 4%. While it didn’t quite match China’s decline, it has still been impressive. The number of people living in extreme poverty has fallen from 140 million to about 10 million.
Note that the international poverty line is extremely low, defined as people living on less than $3 per day. But Indonesia has also made progress when measuring higher poverty lines.
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This measures only extreme poverty, so less than 3$ a day, not poverty in general. If you included other poverty metrics, the difference would be much bigger.
China and Switzerland are both at 0%, doesn't mean China caught up with Switzerland.
Also, making 3$ a day as a farmer in a village far away from the trappings of modern society, surrounded by other villages with the same situation, is going to be different from a worker making 3$ a day in a large city, surrounded by people who are many levels above them in economic status.
If you ask a group from the former and latter communities about the quality of their lives, I’m sure you’ll get wildly different responses.
It really is a crude metric that glosses over what real world experiences can be like. I live in the US and have done a good bit of volunteering at charities that serve the homeless, and have met a lot of folks living on the streets who get Social Security Disability income. By this metric they are well above the "extreme poverty" level because they get hundreds per month in income. But it's not enough for them to actually afford housing and most necessities. Living in a tent by the river without basic access to sanitation is a situation I think most would agree is "extreme poverty", but it's not according to this definition.
Of course this doesn't mean it is totally worthless to define it this way, you have to have some sort of metric in order to track and compare these sorts of things. But it is also important to recognize the wide variety in lived experiences that this might include.
It doesn't really because PPP uses the purchasing power of US dollars in the USA as the baseline. So people making less money in other countries might be adjusted upwards, but people in the US are not adjusted downwards. Someone making hundreds of dollars of SSD income while living in the streets of America is not counted as living in "extreme poverty" under this metric.
That's sort of my point. If I make 3 cents a day elsewhere but am also living in a tent by the river then I would adjust up to $3 a day. People can be a lot poorer than what you are describing.
An individual who isn't getting any SSD at all and is begging, stealing or going hungry is measurably more impoverished than the tent city folks with benefits.
Now that being said I completely agree the thresholds are too low. The regular poverty line in the US is $43 a day which sounds like a lot compared to $3 a day until you do the math and realize its literally only $16k/year.
In my opinion if you can't rent a room, feed yourself, have clean water, and get basic medical care you should be considered in extreme poverty.
I didn't mean to suggest this is the most abject poverty possible. I was using it as a contrast to the comment I responded to, which gave the scenario of "making 3$ a day as a farmer in a village far away from the trappings of modern society, surrounded by other villages with the same situation"
Prices are also very different. Items are cheap in Java, but once you go to islands that are hard to reach basic things like cement for construction cost up to $60 a kilo in Papua vs $15 in Java. I would assume things like electricity or food have similar price differences; regional inequality is pretty steep in Indonesia even compared to China.
In China I noticed the cost of a Jasmine BOYA Chagee is 2/3 or half the price in lower tier inland cities vs tier 1 cities. I guess economies of scale/supply chains are key here.
OP's premise that Indonesia is "not far behind" also strikes me as a bit of a stretch. If you look at the graph, China had practically eliminated extreme poverty a decade ago and completely done so by 2020. About 1/4 and 1/10 Indonesians were still in extreme poverty during each of those times, respectively. Indonesia today is about where China was in 2015. It is great they are improving but is a decade lag on such an extreme indicator "not far behind"? That's subjective, I suppose.
I think it’s worth noting that China controls its internal migration so poor people in the countryside probably don’t move to beg in the cities as much
Also 68% of Indonesians live below 8$ a day in China that’s 21%
It's not near gaurenteed it is gaurenteed.People rarely starve in china unless they are just mentally unwell in some way and unable to get support. If people are just hungry they will be able to access food.
The dibao is extremely low amount that isn’t actually going to do anything. I believe they live off other family members sending money back from city or crop lands
China regulates its migration. It provides benefits if you stay in your home region, benefits that you lose if you leave to go the city. There isn't a hard passport system locking you into a region.
Also like, it mostly serves as a system to funnel folk into small-medium cities vs allowing mass migration to a handful of giant cities, which helps prevent the formation of slums.
I really can't think of a country that has urbanized like China has without a huge prevalence of slums, even the US in the early-to-mid 1900s had shantytowns in most big cities.
rural poverty isn't going to turn into street begging; that's an extremely urban activity. This is probably one of the good reasons to keep the disenfranchised in the countryside, where they can still be employed meaningfully in small towns and villages instead of perpetuating that in the big cities.
One of the main reasons there is extreme inequality in China (their GINI coefficient is about the same as the US) is the wide gap in income between urban and rural Chinese. In the US urban folk make about 23% more than rural people. In China, they make 2.3 times more.
There isn't much stopping someone to migrate from a place to another, other than lose the lack of most of any time of welfare or social support when you are outside of your hukou.
But if you are forced (by economic reason, or because you were found homeless and send back) to go back, you are not likely homeless in your hukou residence, as supposedly you should have home, relativele support and apparently even welfare support.
Nah. It most often just assumes you still have a residence in your birthplace, which is very likely not the case. Plus, it’s inhumane and completely indefensible by modern standards to arbitrarily throw someone out of a city and force them back to a rural area
I feel like the definition of extreme poverty is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. Maybe Indonesian wages have gone up in raw numbers due to inflation or something, and it's great that they're heading in the right direction, but they're no China.
Yes, China is ahead. Were you in China countryside 20 years ago? I remember visiting a house there and met a 12 year old girl who had clearly been malnourished as she looked more like 7.
Depends where you go I suppose. Many major Chinese cities do a lot to push those people out or hide them, but come to poorer provinces and cities and there's no shortage of begging children. You don't even need to look that far, a Tier 2 city like Guiyang is still a relatively prosperous city with a population of 4million, but has whole districts full of children and elderly seen begging or selling anything they can on the streets.
I’ve been to twelve provinces in China and since 2015 ish I think I never saw any begging children. Not saying children are protected well but I don’t see them begging on street. Adult beggars are not uncommon though
I suppose our experiences are always bound to be anecdotal, but I have a hard time believing anyone who's traveled the interior provinces or spent any amount of time in non-capital cities wouldn't have seen the homeless children and elderly around. The entire Dongbei belt is full of displaced families and poor manufacturing cities with struggling people. Heck even the "prosperous" regions of Xinjiang have kids sleeping on the street regularly outside of the tourist spots.
Sorry if my hyperbole wasn't clear, English isn't my first language. There are still very poor districts that if you go walk around local streets you'll see homeless children working or begging every day. North Baiyun has long been a sketchy part of town. In general, you'll find clusters of extreme poverty all over Guizhou, especially in predomenantly Miao and Yi ethnic groups.
Anecdotes are tricky with stats like this because they capture something aggregate numbers miss. The $3/day line is so unbelievably low that millions could technically cross it and still be in a desperate, visible kind of poverty that looks exactly like kids begging. China’s poverty line is higher domestically and their internal monitoring is pretty ruthless, so visible street poverty gets swept aside in a way it doesn't in Indonesia
I spent three weeks in various cities in China earlier this year, I never witnessed a single beggar on the streets. Coming back to Europe was... a downgrade.
There has been a significant reduction ever since the start of covid. That forced a lot of changes to the ways cities are managed. There is significantly less tolerance of beggars by the city administrative enforcement then there was before.
I lived in Shanghai for a year. I know that's the richest part of China but it's exactly the kind of place you'd see lots of beggars. While living there, I of course went all over town. Begging was extremely rare - rarer even than in my home town of Copenhagen, Denmark.
Although I haven't lived there, I have also travelled to the poorest province in China, Gansu, more specifically the city of Jiuquan. Sure people weren't driving sports cars there but I witnessed no abject destitution, homelessness or begging.
I'm not saying these things don't exist in China, just that the quantity of them more than lends credence to the poverty figures.
China deals with homelessness similar to the USSR and other Asian countries combined- like HK and Japan, SROs or other cheap housing of last resort are very common (cage apartments, internet cafes). Like the USSR it has social services, as do most western countries including the US, but both countries put a lot of effort into showcasing their major cities. It wasn't as strict as the USSR which had only certain cities open to tourists, but any beggars would not last long in Beijing, Shanghai, Chongqing, etc because they make the country look bad. Big cities in the west all have begging and homelessness issues, but the US in particular has a habit of city leadership accommodating it for some reason. Drugs also play a big part in homelessness and while there are drugs in China, you are much more likely to get a death sentence peddling them and that does put a damper on their availability.
That’s not a thing in China? Are you talking about something from 20-30 years ago? It’s not even really possible to beg for money in China because people don’t carry cash anymore.
I went to Indonesia often. The most striking difference was labian bajo 2013 vs 2023. Its modernized and cleaned up within a decade. In nearby Malaysia, I went 2016 and 2022 and the difference was even bigger.
Indonesian richest don't like to invest in the country's stock market, so which is why foreign investment takes the biggest portion here. Furthermore, the stock market which is already full of doubts and speculative, in this regime it's even worse, with finance minister already changed twice this year.
The country is going through a crisis. The gas lines in Bali are a kilometer long. Indonesia is a producer of oil and gas, but the sector, along with the rest of the country, is grossly mismanaged.
It's using data from the government and did you know what Indonesia government did with the census which lead to it? Changing the criteria to reduce poverty in statistic data. It becomes a huge controversial topic in Indonesia to the point (afaik) the government retract the statistic result
Legitimate concern. Nothing to do with the graph itself tho. It didn't use BPS's shitty poverty requirement. Instead it used World Bank's international poverty line with a different poverty-measurement methodology, for both China and Indonesia. It's written right there, front and center lol
3 bucks is for extreme poverty. It's not unbelievable, it's around 2 packs of marlong from Indomaret
In 1984, the population of China was approximately 1.04 billion, while the population of Indonesia was approximately 163.25 million.
In terms of actual number of people uplifted from extreme poverty, China's achievement is much more impressive.
I think per capita is still meaningful here since a larger population makes it easier for a country to help a larger amount of people since available manpower typically correlates with population size ( though to be fair there are many other factors.) But just because a country has a smaller population doesn't mean that population is easier to manage
I think it does make it a little harder if you have a larger population, because now you really have to watch out that your efforts are not too centralized and you really have to plan broad and diverse. Japan and South Korea got themselves out of poverty, but it was and is very centralized on a few cities or even a few companies(Seoul is literally 50% of South Koreas GDP and Samsung alone is 13% of their GDP) and then trickles outward. If you are even smaller, finding natural resources can make you rich like Norway, which then can bank roll every other development you want to do.
I still mostly agree with you that per capita is still more meaningful than the population number itself.
In Indonesia's case the country is split into several islands with a vast majority of people clumped in Java, so I'd argue it faces unique challenges in governance. China is at least one big connected country, Indonesia has like 7 main islands separated by the ocean.
Indonesia really is interesting. I don't think it is that easy for China, because they really had to weave a dense net of infrastructure between all the big population centers in the country. I don't know how it is in Indonesia or what their plans are, but they could probably get away with a Japan style system for Java and Sumatra (with a ferry for trains and motor vehicles for the 15 or so km between them), where they have one very robust backbone of rail and highways down along the islands and 90% of their population would benefit from that. The other islands are very separate though.
For goods I see the islands as kind of a benefit though, as ships are a pretty efficient way to move around cargo with relatively little infrastructure, assuming you have enough cargo to move around. You don't need roads through mountains and forest if place A and B both have a harbor.
Why has recent publicity sought to cast Indonesia in a favourable light after international reports highlighted transboundary haze from human-caused forest fires and the government’s inability to manage the crisis?
current Indonesia regime is aligned with US, Russia and China and the digital ministry also do social media manipulation, no wonder they also do that internationally.
What? The minister used to be the right hand man of the US aligned dictatorship, this is true, but in 2026 he has joined BRICS, did military drills with Russia, and appeared at the 2025 military parade in Beijing.
The President won his third run of the Presidency with a good social media campaign on his own; the other two candidates campaigns were quite weak. I doubt its foreign influence and the President still has many supporters despite his issues.
It is shameful for Beijing to invite someone to join the parade, given the historical atrocities ie massive killing, committed against so many Chinese people.
$3 per day in indo could pay for food and water for the entire day since each portion of food is only $1 if you know where to buy them. In the extreme side, 2 packs of indomie cost less than 50 cents and is enough for dinner. The worst ive seen is people eating rice with salt which is around 40 cents per plate of rice give or take. I lived on $2 for my dinner back during internship as i got lunch from the office. The minimum wage in jakarta runs around $10 per day, and you will spend around half of it on tax, rent, and transport leaving you with $5 a day. Thats in jakarta the capital city of indonesia. That assumes you live alone. If you have a kid to feed, good luck.
I just saw a video today of an island in Indonesia not far from Bali that still has a rigid social hierarchy including people born into hereditary slavery lol.
Japan was already industrialised and developed when China was still in its warlord era and totally backwards. Modern China was created in 1949. Japan was an industrial power since the 19th century.
Taiwan and RoK are quite small tbh. They developed really well but one can't reslly compare small countries that also are backed by strong forigen intrests(USA) to a country the size of PRC which has many times the population and size of RoC and RoK combined
Most of the success comes from Deng, but I guess we can’t deny that Mao helped setting up the foundations with education. China wouldn’t have succeeded if the literacy numbers had remained the same
Was China not the poorest country in the world in 1949?
Regardless RoK is small compared to China both in size and population. Developing a small country is far easier then a big one especially with forigen support
Arguably smaller countries can be harder to develop because of the lack of man power. I mean a big key to China's development was their size to become the world's factory.
SK had a gdp per capita of 65.7 dollars in 1953. Although RoK is a small country compared to China, only India wouldn't be a small country compared to it. RoK had around 20 million people after gaining independence which was around #20 in world rankings.
That's true. That being said, inequality is very high in China, almost as bad as the US somehow. The rural vs urban regions have separated so much in terms of prosperity.
Genuinely does that metric matter in a discussion of extreme poverty? If a thousand people lived in a city with elon musk... the gdp per capita would be amazing, and it would also be incredible wealth inequality
Since i haven't looked into that i won't comment, I'm just curious why gdp/capita is always thrown around like its a measurement of civilian livelihood when billionaires are so numerous
That's fair. It's just a first look. For me, since it's a factor of 3, it's going to be difficult for China to make up that difference, even if they didn't have a lot of inequality. If the gdp/capita numbers were close, then you'd really need to get into the details.
the chinese poor are doing far better than the SK and japanese poors, what the fuck are you talking about. Chinese food, housing and medical care are dirt cheap. taxi drivers can own homes in China. sure they can’t buy iphones, but priorities man.
What in the honest fuck are you talking about? Did you just make that up and pray no one would call you out on it?
I've lived in all three countries. China's poor are DIRT poor. Way worse situation that Japan's or Korea's poor. Poor Chinese people literally live in caves.
Not really they were already semi industrialised, namely Japan, or were given extensive aid both financially and through shared technical expertise in industry, medicine, science etc from Western countries. Especially after the war they were given very cheap loans due to the fears of these countries turning to communism otherwise.
Still at the early twentieth century China was historically at it's poorest state it had been in thousands of years. It was a completely destroyed country. Most of its climb out of poverty only started in the nineties after the reforms. And they did it essentially with no outside help in a country of a billion people
One of the best economic development plans of the last century has been to place your country in a strategic area near a communist one and have a large enough communist movement that the US funds your technological development.
The population is a big problem as well, the total population of all developed countries is around 1 billion, which is smaller than China’s population. Lifting 1 billion people to developed country level of wealth require a major restructuring of global supply chain
While wealth started to grow in China in the 90s, most of the significant improvements in life metrics (life expectancy, infant mortality, literacy, home ownership etc) actually happened from 50-80 under Mao.
There's loads of poor old people in Korea it's one of the big problems of the country. The country advanced so fast that the older generation didn't have time to build up a pension so are forced to work now but they don't have the modern day skills so are in really hard low paying jobs.
Can you imagine if China gdp per capita is 3 times of what it is now? It means it basically has total economy 3 times of the USA. It will dwarf rest of the world..it’s just not physically possible given the size of the pie is only so big and it’s growing not as fast.
The US is responsible for a lot of the modern advances in medicine, engineering, science, etc. But that progress isn't hoarded within its boarders. It's not a fixed pie. China would lead in a lot of places and that progress can benefit other countries significantly.
China's case is more impressive because because just 50 years earlier, China was still an under-developed mess, while Japan and its colonies (Korea, Taiwan) were so industrialised they could challenge the west in WW2.
I think GDP per capita isn't necessarily the right measure to compare China to countries that are 1/4 it's population. Because China is capable of having a low per capita because it has a much higher purchasing power. Realistically the better measure would be what % of the chinese population is able to make a European level wage. In china that's 15-20% of the population making ¥140,000 or $20,000. Which with purchasing power is around ~$35,000. So, 20% of a country of 1.4 billion making equivalent to $35000 is several orders in magnitude more impressive than Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan.
Africa has been destabilized purposefully, as it is a global source of natural resources for corporations to plunder. Any time there is talk of pan-Africanism or a African dollar similar to the Euro, it gets international interference. China is large enough to negotiate collectively, as is Indonesia. Africa is still reeling from colonialism and is the ground floor of capitalism.
Because China’s poverty was due to colonialism, Japanese imperialism, poor governing and civil warfare. Once the consequences of those things were overcome it went back to being a prosperous place, and this has happened many times throughout Chinese history. There’s no such blueprint for Africa because it’s many newer countries.
Then why was "culturally-uniform" China so much poorer in the 19th century than the ethnically-diverse United States? The only thing that matters is infrastructure to convert resources into wealth, not racist fantasies of ethnic homogeneity.
because empires rise and fall and the qing dynasty already had its time as the most powerful and wealthiest country in the world during the first half of its history (1680s to 1810s)
Africa isn't a country, it's a massive continent filled with many unfriendly neighbors.
China murdered the dissidents so well that they can control them better. They also learned by watching what America did right and what it did wrong and embracing a controlled form of capitalism.
Few reasons. But I'll focus on one everyone is missing. Geography.
Africa struggles to move goods. It is wealthy, but railroads are hard to build, due to terrain. And navigable rivers pretty much don't exist in Africa, the Nile is only navigable to the first cataract so pretty much only Egypt can use it to take goods to sea. And other large rivers either don't exist or have this issue even worse. The Livingstone Falls make the entire Congo inaccessible from the sea. China and America's rivers are infinitely more navigable, its ports deeper, and the terrain kinder to construction. Ofc other issues like corruption, warlords, HIV/AIDs, lack of national unity are more or less of an issue in various countries, but that's one I don't see talked about.
Actually I wanted to discuss the neo colonialism of the continent too. A number of former French colonies don't control their own currency, using the African Franc, made by France, while certain countries really shouldn't have their own currency rn, like Zimbabwe, but the African franc deprives those nations of economic flexibility for stability, ok for not collapsing, usually, but growth is more challenging. The French Foreign Legion also exists and is active in Africa, and they are a...mixed bag.
Because there are 0 socio-economic parallels between China and Africa for this comparison to be made in the first place tbh. There is not one condition in China that led to its development that is mirrored in Africa. It's like saying how come dolphins are able to use echolocation but giraffes can't?
China is a country with mostly one language, Africa is a continent with tons of different religions and languages. Also, a few African leaders tried that and the US “liberated” them
Probably unrelated but I asked an Indonesian caregiver on a date here in Taiwan, we are in our 40s. She asked me for a 1200 USD gold necklace so we could start dating. I was a bit surprised and of course declined.
Probably unrelated but Indonesia has never made it to the world cup. One of my friends said they did. I was a bit surprised but of course it wasn't the case.
3 dollars (around 60,000 rupiah in Indonesian currency) in 2026 is worth 20x less than it was worth in 1984... 3 dollars (60,000 rupiah) back in 1984 is worth around 60 dollars (1,200,000 rupiah) today... So, isn't this like saying that there's significantly fewer people in 2026 that live off of 3 dollars/day, vs the number of people that lived off of 60 dollars/day in 1984?
approximately Rp18,180 to Rp18,465 per day, or about Rp546,400 per person per month
In 2021, Rp18,465 is approximately 1.3US$. For comparison, 1 liter of gasoline is 10k IDR, one meal in Jakarta is 6k IDR for the cheapest one. IPhone 12 at that time is 12mio IDR after taxes, granted that the tax for it is high.
So no, the poverty rate defined is so low and not updated following the inflation.
That sounds about right to me as an Indonesian... Yeah, now it seems like it's adjusted by some sort of measure of purchasing power but the method is so imprecise that it needs to be re-evaluated every few years and be calculated based on questionnaires...
It's worth noting that this chart uses the baseline International Poverty Line ($3/day PPP) a survival benchmark meant for low income nations significantly poorer than China where things are also far cheaper. China is an upper middle income economy, yet Beijing heavily promoted its eradication of "extreme poverty" using a rock bottom threshold near this lowest tier. If you apply the World Bank poverty benchmark actually intended for upper middle income countries (around $6.85 per day PPP), hundreds of millions of people in China are still considered poor, as former Premier Li Keqiang pointed out when noting that 600 million citizens lived on less than $140 a month.
The funny thing is, because Xi Jinping ordered the eradication of poverty, officials naturally fabricated the statistics to show it was done. It’s the exact same story with China’s 5% GDP growth last year, Xi demanded 5%, and lo and behold, it hit exactly 5% by the end of the year. The real problem is realy hidden behind.
That is commendable. But buying power in China is still pretty low. The government even stated this was their goal as they should not be spoiled. Correct me if I'm wrong.
Then the report is lie. I don't know what institution published this graphic, but it's been lied to. This graphic is wrong. The truth is, in the past 10 months, the number of people being put in different tax brackets is really high. There are millions of people who are supposed to be lower income being put into middle income.
I think measures of poverty should be something like access to clean water, sufficient food, medical care, education. Like putting a dollar amount is going to be a mess
Hmm the number are bit wrong I guess in Indonesia, the threshold of poverty in here are questionable. Indonesia have very lower threshold for this that it doesnt even make sense i think.
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u/cavedave OC: 115 16h ago
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