> And we see the effects of poverty on education: "Surveys by Rozelle's team have found that more than half of eighth graders in poor rural areas in China have IQs below 90, leaving them struggling to keep up with the fast-paced official curriculum"

Just remember that we do not measure in the US IQ these days because the results would be very painful to look at for the poor of the US.

I am not worried about the poverty, I am more worried about the whole estate boom and it is on the edge of collapsing. Actually, there are ghost cities in China...those who got rich because they sold lands. They weren't rich because of their skills. This is a big problem to create a more balanced social classes based on income. A healthy economy cannot rely on just one or two specializationa (this is so evidence in Hong Kong, where nearly the captials were built on banking, investment and real estate; there is very little room for anything else to emerge). China has the same problem: major cities is populated with the professionals. In America at least every state has something to offer...

The things you mention are easily turned around (I certainly don't support the CCP, however).

Maybe the Chinese are very efficient with their money (try living on $4 a day in the US; or what does $4 mean in China?), or don't need as much money due to... a socialist system and/or, if you prefer, Hong Kong Post. Maybe they've started to realize the dream of Star Trek's "economy". ;)

"Consider the aggregate IQs of rural and urban/suburban whites [in the US]. During the 1970s according to Wordsum-IQ data, the intelligence gap between whites raised on farms and those who grew up in an urban/suburban background was enormous, almost exactly equal to the white/black gap. The data would indicate that a non-trivial slice of the white farmboys of the 1970s suffered from clinical mental retardation".

Whatapp employed 55 employees when it was sold for 19 billion.

Banning whatsapp to get local competitor which employs local talent, is actually better for China from poverty point of view, isn't it?

Because they are poor, they do not have the right access to the resources both nutrition and education. Eliminating poverty is at the top priority of the gov't plans. It's said to totally finish the plan in 2020.