This is a weird one. Bear with me. From [email protected]:
So I said to myself, “that’s a little bit weird. The US one going up, I can actually believe, but the North Korea one being lower is definitely wrong.”
I think Our World In Data is just being shoddy, as they often do.
https://www.wfp.org/countries/democratic-peoples-republic-korea
The thing I found funny, and why I’m posting here, comes from observing why it was that they started their graph at 2003 and exactly at 2003.
I feel like you could use this as a slide in a little seminar in “how to curate your data until it matches your conclusion, instead of the other way around.”
And also, I don’t think the hunger rate suddenly dropped from epic to 0 exactly in 2003, I think more likely Our World in Data is just a little bit shoddy about their data.
Recently an economist, who writes for an economics paper in China, showed a billion people in China lived on 280 USD, or less, per month, which would mean most of China’s population is still in poverty, and their 800 million number was either not true, or that there was a big back slide they have been covering up. He used meta-data from Chinese academic institutes, and the CCP’s own reports.
Since that report went viral on Weibo, then the west, the CCP, and foreign groups they operate through, have nearly erased it. When you would search for “billion people in china still in poverty” Google would have like 10 links to articles about it. Now it is buried down page, behind a dozen or so links about China lifting varying numbers of people from poverty. The ones still there are from only less reputable, or less known, sites. So getting to the citation, that is real, is basically dead.
China’s response has changed, been contradictory, and has mostly become vague sentiments of anti-Chinese interests.
It went from numerous, well established, media outlets, to me being able to only find this trash article about the censorship on trash newsweek.
The framing is real shit, but the direct info about Li, and what happened are there. However it was originally reported in Caixin, which is a mainstream Chinese financial paper. It wasn’t even a hit piece. The guy was citing their demographics issues, plateauing growth, aging population, stress on funds to elderly, etc. He even says that the CCP is very competent in that regard, and projected that, taking this information into mind, they could still double their GDP in record time.
https://www.newsweek.com/china-article-censorship-1-billion-people-monthly-income-2000-yuan-poverty-1856031