China’s poverty victory and America’s poverty shame

China eliminated extreme poverty while America’s tripled—but before we declare a winner, consider this: the World Bank recently raised its poverty threshold from $2.15 to $3 per day, instantly adding 125 million people to global poverty counts with the stroke of a pen.

This technical adjustment exposes a fundamental problem with how we measure human welfare. We’re tracking survival thresholds, not meaningful lives. When China claims zero people live below $3 daily while over 4 million Americans do, we’re not comparing two societies’ moral choices—we’re comparing consumption patterns in a command economy against income volatility in a market economy.

The real story isn’t about authoritarian efficiency versus democratic failure; it’s about how both superpowers have sacrificed human health on different altars.

China’s achievement is real but incomplete. Lifting 943 million people above subsistence represents extraordinary state capacity, the kind of coordinated resource mobilization few governments have ever managed.

The country deployed a dense mix of tools—rapid growth, rural infrastructure investment, targeted poverty alleviation campaigns, and expansion of basic social insurance—with the state directly orchestrating the reallocation of resources toward impoverished regions and households.

Yet health inequality among China’s low-income population has actually widened since 2010, with chronic disease gaps between rich and poor increasing significantly. Rural-urban health disparities persist despite income gains.

The spreadsheet victory obscures a grimmer reality: as the country shifts toward consumption-driven growth, new vulnerabilities are emerging for the structurally “left behind”—rural elderly, internal migrants and low-wage workers who need continuous, high-quality care rather than episodic, minimal coverage.

Meanwhile, America generates unprecedented wealth while systematically denying healthcare to millions through Medicaid cuts and insurance rollbacks. The country’s poorest 10% now claim just 1.8% of national income—comparable to Bolivia—despite per capita output six times higher than China’s.

In 1980, middle-income Americans earned over half the amount of those at the 90th percentile; by 2023, that share had dropped to just 42.5%. Current US policies will cut bottom-decile household income by nearly 7% while the richest fifth gains ground.

Technology and global trade reshaped the economy, rewarding high-skilled workers while replacing the less skilled with robots. Yet these are not accidents of capitalism; they represent consistent political priorities maintained across 50 years and administrations of both parties.

During the Covid-19 pandemic, temporary expansions of cash transfers and health coverage sharply reduced poverty—but the subsequent rollback showed this was a policy experiment the political system was not prepared to sustain.

Here’s where ideology meets biology: both nations are conducting vast experiments in population health with opposite pathologies. China achieved universal basic subsistence but burdened its poor with catastrophic healthcare costs that perpetuate inequality across generations.

America’s system delivers world-class care for those who can afford it while tolerating worse population-level health outcomes than many poorer countries, especially for low-income and minority communities.

Income and wealth gaps translate directly into avoidable deaths through underinsurance, medical debt, delayed care, and exposure to pollution and unhealthy working conditions. China’s life expectancy now exceeds America’s, yet both countries face widening health disparities that dollar-a-day metrics cannot capture.

Cardiovascular disease risk factors among the extremely poor globally challenge assumptions that poverty means calorie scarcity. Surviving on $3 a day doesn’t equal health security in Beijing or Baltimore.

The real lesson for developing nations watching this contest isn’t “choose the Chinese model” or “emulate American markets.” It’s that poverty eradication without health equity merely creates different forms of suffering.

Taiwan offers an instructive counterpoint: it exempts all medical co-payments for low-income patients and those with catastrophic illness, achieving both economic development and health protection without sacrificing one for the other.

The climate imperative adds urgency—lifting people from extreme poverty generates just 5% of global emissions, but providing middle-income living standards requires fundamentally different development pathways that neither superpower has achieved sustainably. For middle-income countries watching this contrast, the healthier path lies in treating basic income security and universal health coverage as non-negotiable public infrastructure.

Rather than debating which superpower’s poor suffer less, the China-US comparison demands we abandon poverty metrics designed for 1990s policy debates. What matters isn’t whether someone crosses a $3 threshold but whether they can access healthcare without bankruptcy, feed their family nutritious food, and escape intergenerational poverty traps.

China proved that political will can mobilize resources at scale. America demonstrates that productivity alone guarantees nothing for the vulnerable.

The synthesis that neither achieved? Health-centered development that treats survival metrics as floors, not ceilings, and measures national success by how the most fragile members of society fare when crisis strikes.

Until both superpowers grasp this, their poverty statistics will remain monuments to mismeasurement—technically impressive, morally insufficient and irrelevant to human flourishing.

Y Tony Yang is an endowed professor at the George Washington University in Washington, DC.