So i got recommended this video recently and i was very skeptical at first. Looked clickbaity, and also, usually when travel vloggers do things like this in developing countries it tends to be quite exploitative and scummy, taking advantage of poor people and making a spectacle out of them.

I don’t know much about these vloggers, but in this case it does seem like it’s fairly harmless and respectful of the person they featured, who apparently contacted them and asked them to do the video, not the other way around. I appreciate that they blurred her face, and that they didn’t treat her like some kind of curiosity but really just showed a normal person’s life. (Though i do wish they had a translator because there was a bit of a language barrier.)

For these reasons i think this is ok, and maybe a valuable educational resource, because for me the real indicator of a country’s prosperity is not how its wealthiest people live, or even the median, but how its poorest live. How are those at the very bottom of society treated? It goes without saying that this is not even comparable to how the people in similar situations live in the US (so many people homeless or living in their cars) or even much of Europe.

My takeaway: the government really does do a lot to take care of poor people in China, up to and including paying most of their rent and subsidizing much of their other costs of living too. Healthcare for instance is something that China often gets criticism for from leftists because it does not yet have completely free universal healthcare yet, and that’s true. But as the Chinese people in this video explain, if you are low income the government will pay the vast majority of the costs, so really what is left is basically just a token fee.

And yes, some could argue that in rural areas there are still many people who are poorer than the poorest person in a city. In terms of just monetary income that may be true, but people in rural areas also tend to have things like animals and plots of land that let them sustain themselves without needing as much money as a person living in a city would. There the issue is more of accessibility to infrastructure, and this is apparently an aspect that has been rapidly improving in recent years.

Also, this is in one of the richest cities in China. Obviously not all cities offer the same level of welfare. And i’m also not including Hong Kong, where, due to the different economic and political system (One Country, Two Systems is kind of fucked and needs to end imo), the situation is far, far more dire for the poorest people living in the city than in basically any other part of China - yet another disastrous consequence of British imperialism…