I have been carrying on about China quite a lot lately. But when you have discovered what amounts to a parallel universe, one that is almost completely hidden from view from the vantage point of the universe that you inhabit, you have to do something about it; you have to spread the word that the mainstream media is assiduously covering up.
The progression of the literary outburst prompted by my recent visit to China can be summarized as follows. My first article on the subject, written shortly after my return in late July 2026, simply records my astonishment at the pace, sophistication, scale and inclusiveness of China’s development since the early 1990s and attributes at least part of this to the beliefs and values that infuse what I call the ‘civilizational state’.
The second one revives an argument I first made in 1995 about the effects of culture on ‘good’ governance, arguing that from the point of view of the ordinary citizen as opposed to the ruling class the ‘one-best-way’ liberal democratic version has turned out to be something of a flop and that we should learn to accept that there are other possibilities, some of which (like China’s) demonstrate graphically what can be achieved when taxes are spent on public services (instead of war machines etc.).
The third one applies the same – anti-‘one-best-way’ – logic to John Mearsheimer’s idea of ‘offensive realism’ (OR), which is the dominant paradigm of international relations in the West, and criticises it on epistemological grounds and on the basis of whose interests are really served behind the fig leaf of the ‘state’ by the perpetual power seeking and aggression of those who behave according to its dictates (many of whom, I suggest, are entirely cynical in this regard). I concluded that “We must reject the reflex of OR dogmatists and those who simply use OR as a cudgel or as flimsy intellectual cover to dismiss China’s cooperative strategy abroad as a mere subterfuge or as a sneaky prelude to the inevitable aggression that is bound to come…”
In this article, I want to drill a little deeper into how the two most powerful countries on Earth regard poverty and to argue that the significant differences between them in this respect are crucial factors in their national security and geopolitical rivalry.
‘Poverty Realism’ in the US and China
According to an extensive World Bank (2000) survey, when you ask poor people what matters to them, they say pretty much what you would expect them to say. Namely, that they want food, shelter and work; protection from crime and violence; basic infrastructure that affords them access to clean drinking water, proper sanitation, affordable power, road and rail networks and other forms of connectivity that are essential to daily survival; freedom from discrimination; dignity and respect; and access to quality education for their children. Note that the types of ‘freedoms’ that are touted so loudly by ruling elites in the West do not appear in this list.
In the year 2000, the official US poverty rate was 11.3%, or roughly 31.1 million people. According to the latest figures from the US Census Bureau, the national poverty rate has dropped to 10.6% but, because of overall population increase, the number of people said to be living in poverty is now about 35.9 million.
These figures are conservative because the official poverty line does not include basic expenses such as housing: rent and home prices have outpaced general inflation for decades, consuming 30% to 50% of low-income budgets; healthcare: out-of-pocket medical bills and insurance premiums represent a significant financial burden for poor families; and childcare and technology: when parents work, childcare is often obligatory, as are costs like cell phone and internet access.
To account for these omissions, some researchers therefore use twice the official poverty threshold (~$63,600 for a family of four) as the benchmark for a bare-minimum cost of living in today’s US. People in this category are often one car breakdown or medical bill away from financial ruin because they have zero savings (e.g., Brady, 2026). About 26.2% of the US population falls below this line; that is, roughly 89 million people.
The contrast with China could not be greater: In the year 2000, about half of the population lived in poverty, but by 2022, extreme poverty had been eliminated. A miraculous 940 million Chinese have been lifted out of extreme poverty since 1990 (Roser & Arriagada, 2026).
Rather than repeat many of the other well-known statistics on the wants of the poor set out above and on the disparities between China and the US on these and other measures, to further highlight the chasm between them, we shall concentrate our attention here on public safety and crime, and on drug abuse.
Public Safety and Crime
In the US, as elsewhere, poverty and violent crime tend to go together. Low-income neighborhoods are disproportionately affected by aggravated assault, armed robbery and rape, gun violence, and gang activity. If you are poor in a US city, the chances are you will live with chronic survival stress – worrying about being attacked while walking home after dark, your children’s safety at school, or being hit by stray bullets (e.g., Harrell et al., 2014).
In China, on the other hand, violent crime is extremely rare (e.g., Yin, 2024). A poor person – including a woman walking alone – can wander through almost any neighborhood in a Chinese city at 3 am without the slightest fear of being mugged, assaulted, or caught in crossfire (e.g., McKenzie, 2024; Blunt, 2026).
The psychological relief of not living in constant fear of physical violence is a huge benefit. It removes a layer of trauma that the poor in the US must contend with constantly.
Drug Abuse
The US is currently ravaged by a synthetic drug epidemic (e.g., Ciccarone, 2022), with fentanyl and methamphetamines devastating low-income communities, tearing families apart, and fuelling street and property crime and homelessness.
Again, the contrast with China is stark. China has maintained an iron grip on drug trafficking and usage. There, you do not see open-air drug markets, discarded needles in parks or railway stations, parts of major cities (like Seattle) that have become ‘Zombielands’ (e.g., CGTN, 2023), or communities hollowed out by addiction (e.g., Cui et al., 2025).
For a poor family, this of course means that your children are not growing up surrounded by the visible devastation and crime caused by hard drugs or subjected to the temptations to use them, thereby eliminating conditions that frequently keep poor US families trapped in intergenerational addiction.
Critics of what China has achieved will often say that to obtain these benefits, everyone there must be prepared to subject themselves to strict and heavy-handed state control. But, as noted above, for the average citizen, who is just trying to survive and feed his or her family, abstract debates about the minutiae of political dissent matter far less than whether they have a roof over their heads, can feed their children and not have them subjected to conditions of drug abuse, or will be safe when they step out of their front door.
Even when Western critics point to structural hurdles like the Hukou (household registration) system, they often misunderstand how it is perceived by Chinese citizens. While the Hukou restricts rural migrants’ easy access to top-tier urban schools and medical subsidies, contributing to a persistent urban-rural wealth gap, and is criticized for this, it is not viewed by the population as an instrument of arbitrary tyranny or discrimination. Rather, the broader system is perceived by Chinese citizens as providing for order, predictability, and protection – particularly by urban residents. The state ensures that even if you are struggling on the lower rungs of the economic ladder, you can feed and house yourself, that you are safe, that your neighborhood is peaceful, and that your community is not plagued by substance abuse.
In the US, unless you belong to an ethnic minority or (increasingly) are an immigrant or Muslim (e.g., Blunt & Salehi, 2026), you have some (though diminishing) freedom to dissent and complain about the government, but you are also discarded and left to bear the burden of protecting yourself in a society with high rates of violent crime and a fraying social fabric. In China, you might have to forego a degree of political expression (which is not high on your list of priorities in any case), but in return, the system guarantees a level of public safety that allows you to live without fear of being attacked or molested or robbed or killed by your fellow citizens.
The prevailing attitude in the establishment West reminds me of the smug ‘leafy suburb’ response of some years ago to Singapore’s achievements in these respects, which were widely criticized for the authoritarian costs they were said to incur. All the while, Singaporean citizens themselves looked at their world-class public housing, safe streets, and booming economy and said, “This works for us.” Public trust in government institutions in Singapore remains exceptionally high by international standards, at 77% (Humphries & Oliveiro, 2026).
Government Legitimacy
The high approval ratings (95%) for the Chinese government – which have been documented not just by state media, but by long-term, independent Western studies like the Harvard Kennedy School’s 13-year study on Chinese public opinion (e.g., Cunningham et al., 2020) – are rooted in tangible results of the type discussed above and on all of the measures set out in the World Bank survey. For hundreds of millions of families, China’s poverty miracle has meant significant material progress in all of the areas of need identified by the poor as being important to them – moving within a single generation from dirt-floor huts with no electricity to modern apartments with power, plumbing, high-speed rail access, and secure food supplies.
For them, government legitimacy isn’t based on the sham of electoral democracy and the false promises of open competition that they see in the West. It is based on whether life is noticeably better, safer, and more prosperous today than it was yesterday. For the vast majority of ordinary Chinese citizens, the answer to that question is an unequivocal and resounding ‘yes’.
The ‘leafy suburb’ sneering from affluent Westerners – which, as with their views of Singapore, points at the high costs paid by way of losses of personal freedoms – is simply a function of privilege and complacency. When you don’t have to worry about starving, being gunned down in your neighborhood, or watching your community get destroyed by fentanyl, it is very easy to declare that “abstract political freedom” is more important.
But to a poor person, those – often tenuous – freedoms have no bearing on the satisfaction of their basic needs: What good is the right to vote (in a corporate-controlled democratic system) if you can’t feed or house or educate your children or keep them safe? What good is (limited) freedom of speech if you are afraid to walk to the grocery store at night?
Different Definitions of “Freedom”
The discussion to this point suggests two fundamentally different interpretations of what it means to be a “free” human being.
First is a kind of ‘negative freedom’ (the Western capitalist model), which is largely premised on freedom from government interference. The right to be left alone, to consume (as directed!); to speak out – so long as it is ‘clerky and calculating’ or ‘reckless at slow speed’ as Arundhati Roy would say and conducted within increasingly narrowly defined boundaries; to vote within a rigged system; and to compete in a ‘loaded’ market. The (deliberate – see below) effect of this model is that the state takes little or no responsibility if you fail or are rejected by the system for other reasons, leading to the extreme discrimination, poverty, crime, and homelessness seen in the US.
Second is a kind of ‘positive freedom’ (The East Asian/Singapore/China model), which is premised on the freedom to live a stable, dignified life. That is, freedom from hunger, freedom from violent crime, freedom from drug epidemics, and freedom from homelessness. The state delivers on all of these things, but in return it is expected that people will conform to the collective order and obey the law.
When the choice is put in this way, it becomes entirely rational that an ordinary citizen in China – or Singapore – (and perhaps an increasing number in the West) would look at the duplicity of government, the chaos, violence, and visible decay in major Western cities and conclude that the Chinese system is superior.
Structural and Systemic Differences
The differences highlighted above have not come about accidentally.
The poverty, the homelessness, the addiction, and the violence that are part of everyday life in the US are not system failures; they are the duplicitous system working exactly as designed, one in which people are treated as economic inputs or collateral damage in the pursuit of elite wealth accumulation. By framing poverty, addiction, and homelessness as individual moral failures rather than systemic ones, the responsibility is shifted entirely onto the vulnerable person. This atomization breaks down collective solidarity. It ensures that the working class remains fragmented and unable to organize effectively, while the state’s primary function becomes the promotion of dog-eat-dog competition, a complete disregard for ‘losers’, and the protection of private property and capital rather than the common good.
When viewed through this lens, the contrast between the two systems becomes even sharper, as it exposes a fundamental difference in how governments interact with wealthy elites. In the US and other Western capitalist states, capital (the ruling class) effectively controls politics. The system values above all else the absolute freedom of capital and pretends to grant the same to the individual (while busy manufacturing his/her consent) – and it ruthlessly discards those who no longer serve its purposes. The resulting casualties on the street are there by design and are treated as failures that deserve their fates. They serve as exemplars to the rest of the working class – who must be grateful for what they have been allowed to have, lest they end up there too.
However, in China, the reverse is the case – the government is firmly in control of capital. The state retains absolute primacy over its elite class and its billionaires. Through campaigns like “Common Prosperity,” the Chinese state has shown it is willing to crack down aggressively on its own tech billionaires and real estate tycoons if they threaten collective societal stability or engage in corruption (e.g., Campbell, 2021). The primary goal is to maintain the strength of the social fabric and public support, and hence the longevity of the system, rather than protecting private profit at all costs.
In a system that prioritizes stability, in order to prevent social unrest, the state has a vested interest in providing you with a dignified existence, and in keeping you fed and healthy, educated and employable, housed, and safe.
In a system built on hyper-capitalism and atomization, if you cease to be profitable, you simply end up being discarded and becoming invisible.
As the surveys of government legitimacy and citizen satisfaction indicate, ordinary people in China (95% satisfied) and the USA (about 20%) are keenly aware of the successes and failures of their governments on the matters discussed. The best attempts of the corporate-controlled mainstream media to convince them otherwise notwithstanding, how could they not be? To back this up, according to the Pew Research Centre (2023), when US citizens are asked to say in one word or phrase what they feel about politics only 2% use positive terms, as opposed to 79% who use negative or critical words, most commonly “divisive” and “corrupt” followed by adjectives like “messy”, “bad”, “chaos”, “disgusting”, “joke”, “terrible”, “crazy”, “dysfunctional” and “broken”. Most citizens are unable or unwilling to identify strong points of the nation’s political system – about one third gave no answer, while another 22% wrote “nothing” – meaning that in their view, the political system does not have any strengths.
Why do the Differences Matter Geopolitically?
There are two main ways in which the stark differences depicted above (and related differences) impinge on international relations and geopolitics. The first concerns their effects on the character of economic and trade relations between countries, and the second concerns their impact on the attitudes and performance of those who will do the fighting and the dying on the front line in the event of war.
Economic and Trade Relations
For decades, the dominant model for global development was dictated by Western institutions like the World Bank and IMF and loan conditionality that included austerity, privatization of public assets, and deregulation or the creation of ‘conducive investment climates’ (meaning conducive to Western corporate exploitation and extraction). For many developing nations, this approach was also designed to replicate in their countries the economic atomization and inequality that characterized the donor nations (e.g., Blunt et al., 2023).
By contrast, China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) offers infrastructure-led, state-driven win-win development designed to benefit both the partner state and the beneficiary. Instead of lecturing countries on political systems and preparing the policy and legislative setting for extracting their natural resources, China builds deep-water ports, high-speed rail, clean power systems, and digital networks (e.g., Green Finance and Development Centre, 2025). The underlying philosophy is that authentic sovereignty, development, and stability are built on concrete, physical, and economic enabling conditions – essentially, it is a global extension of China’s domestic poverty alleviation strategy and its commitment to the common good.
Western powers view the rapid spread of this model as a direct threat. Recognizing that their mode of development assistance cannot ‘outcompete’ it, they have shifted to aggressive containment. A strategy driven by a conviction that the longer they wait, the more difficult it will be for a US-led West to maintain its rapidly diminishing global dominance.
The consequences include overt protectionism, ‘disciplinary’ tariffs, trade wars, technical containment – involving, for example, advanced AI chips (e.g., Schwartz & Liu, 2026) – and military alliances and threats. Examples include the latest attempts by the US to ‘strangle’ Iran economically through its ‘Operation Economic Outcast’. In Mearsheimer’s (2026) view, these attempts are futile and evidence of the US’s increasing desperation.
The clash between these two irreconcilable worldviews – a Western model that exports the dominance of capital and depends on extraction and exploitation, and a Chinese model that exports the philosophy of state-coordinated, collective stability and cooperation for mutual benefit (e.g., Sachs in Blunt et al., 2025) – is well advanced and playing out in different spheres of influence such as the Pacific (e.g., Wallis & Tubilewicz, 2024; Levine, 2026).
If, as seems likely, the geopolitical friction and economic crises continue to worsen (against a backdrop of runaway climate change – see, for example, Cribb, 2026), the result will be the type of military conflict between regional and would-be global hegemons that Mearsheimer’s notion of offensive realism regards as inevitable.
Performance on the Frontline
If this happens, the societies best equipped to weather the storm may very well be the ones that prioritize collective stability and national unity, physical safety, the common good, and public infrastructure over hyper-individualism, fake freedoms, elite enrichment, and market speculation.
When a global storm hits, a society that knows how to build, has secured its vital resources, and maintains a solid, protective floor under its whole population has a firm and resilient foundation. Whereas a society characterized by high debt, elite control in its own interests, widespread violent crime, drug abuse, poverty and homelessness, and deep social atomization and alienation risks disintegration.
As the war against Iran has demonstrated, when a society is tested by a major conflict and long-term sanctions, or threatened with economic collapse, the bond between the citizen and the state is critical to performance on the front lines, resilience, and survival.
China’s foundations: In a system built on collective stability, national and civilizational pride, and tangible performance legitimacy, nearly all citizens view the state and their civilization as the means that lifted them out of poverty and continue to provide for their needs and protect them from crime and chaos. They are therefore highly committed to defending them. There is a unified sense of national purpose and civilizational identity.
The hyper-individualist US foundations: In a system defined by atomization and extreme inequality, where the most vulnerable are left to fend for themselves and the working class is exploited (and knows it), that internal bond does not exist or is in tatters. If a society deliberately treats its poorest citizens as expendable – leaving them to face homelessness, addiction, or mass incarceration – it becomes much less likely that they will risk their lives to protect the elites who enriched themselves by designing a system that was designed to produce these precise effects.
The US military’s long reliance on “economic conscription” – using the promise of healthcare, college tuition, and an escape from poverty to recruit from low-income communities – has started to break down as a result of the chronic social and economic malaise that afflicts the US, elements of which have been discussed here. Recently, all branches of the US military have faced unprecedented recruitment shortages (e.g., Filkins, 2025). Trust in public institutions is at all-time lows, and a generation of poor people raised in an atomized society plagued by corporate greed and political dysfunction asks itself: Why should I put my life at risk to maintain a status quo that doesn’t care if I starve or end up on the street or in a prison cell?
Conversely, a society that guarantees a basic floor of physical well-being, safety, order, and dignity for all its citizens creates a population that identifies with the survival of the state. They aren’t fighting for elite enrichment and corporate profits; they are fighting for the stability of their communities and the continuity of their civilization, that is, for themselves and their loved ones and fellow citizens now and in the future.
Conclusion
If, as seems almost certain, the transition to a multipolar world does lead to more pronounced military and economic conflict among the great powers, the outcome will not be decided solely by technological superiority or financial and economic sanctions. It will be decided as well, and perhaps most of all, by whether a society can withstand the immense pressures without falling apart – by its social cohesion.
An atomized capitalist society like the US which depends on its poor and dispossessed to do the fighting and dying (as they all do) faces the very real prospect that a major crisis will cause its internal contradictions to explode, leading to widespread civil unrest; low morale and widespread desertion and fragging in the military (as happened in Vietnam); further social disintegration; and systemic paralysis or collapse. On the other hand, a society built on a developmental, disciplined, humane, and collective foundation can absorb enormous external shocks because its people are willing to endure immense suffering and to pull together to defend the whole.
As these two forms of state governance accelerate towards a head-on collision, the ultimate irony of Western hegemony may be that in its smug, self-absorbed, arrogant, and relentless pursuit of elite control and enrichment, it has systematically destroyed the very social fabric upon which its survival depended.