Searching for HOMELESS People in China 中国的流浪汉在哪？Unseen China - YouTube Searching for HOMELESS People in China 中国的流浪汉在哪？Unseen China SEARCHING FOR HOMELESS IN CHINA! - YouTube, JERRY GOODE Why is there virtually no homelessness in China? This is a very interesting question. I think there are four reasons homelessness is almost non-existent in China. First is that this prosperity is relatively new. China was still relatively poor even in the late 1980s. So there was an effect on the genetic pool. The less fit were filtered out. (Or viewing this very pessimistically, a huge segment of the population was killed off by starvation and poverty a few decades earlier in the country's history) The second thing is that in a country with a rapidly growing economy, increasing land prices have not kept up with the growth of economic opportunity, so it allows more overall opportunity for the population. This could be discussed in more detail, but capitalism creates much larger levels of opportunity when the economy is growing. We cannot ignore the effect of Chinese culture on this, the very strong ties between parents and children, or the drive to work, extreme thriftiness, discipline and self control. (Some of this is genetic) And lastly, there is some effort by local authorities to sweep any homelessness problems away. So it could be said homelessness is just not very tolerated in the city areas. There are plenty of affordable rural areas in China. The people may live in poverty there, but they will not be homeless. In fact there is almost a little bit of a problem of depopulation in some rural areas, since so many migrants have tried to relocate to cities for better jobs.
There are people literally living in caves in China. Outside the big cities on the East Coast, there is more crushing poverty than perhaps you can imagine.
