Between 1978 and 2019, approximately 800 million Chinese people were lifted out of extreme poverty — accounting for roughly three-quarters of the entire world’s poverty reduction during those four decades, and the fastest and largest reduction in extreme poverty ever recorded in human history according to the World Bank

The single largest reduction in human poverty in the recorded history of the species happened in one country across the working career of essentially one man’s political dominance. Deng Xiaoping did not personally lift 800 million people out of poverty. The reforms his December 1978 Plenum initiated — de-collectivisation of agriculture, restoration of family farming [...] The post Between 1978 and 2019, approximately 800 million Chinese people were lifted out of extreme poverty — accounting for