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China doesn't receive much press in the US, and when it does it is almost entirely negative. The US corporate media is utterly committed to an Orientalist worldview of China. Corporate media outlets are motivated by imperialist shareholders and state actors whose sole interest is to weaken China's rising influence in global affairs. So China must be painted as a so-called authoritarian state where democracy is fully out of reach. This narrative completely negates the fact that China's unprecedented economic growth has led to an equally impressive reduction in poverty.

But US ruling circles are not interested in poverty reduction. In fact, US ruling circles are doing everything possible to prevent the reduction of poverty worldwide. Under capitalism, poverty is profit. Corporate executives and Wall Street financiers make their billions by extracting surplus from the wages of labor as profit. Profit is then distributed to expand capitalist operations, invest in new and riskier financial schemes, and to enrich individual capitalists. It is this system that has led to vilest form of inequality, as the six richest individuals owning more wealth than half of the world's population suggests.

China's market socialist model of development has given rise to millionaires of its own. However, internal inequality in Chinese society is not antagonistic to the people as a whole. When the 2008 economic crisis hit the US and West, millions of workers lost their jobs and homes. The largest wealth transfer in US history was facilitated by the Obama Administration. China, on the other hand, maintained steady levels of economic growth during the crisis. Rapid development facilitated poverty alleviation in China despite the global economic crisis.

According to Xinhua news agency, China has made great strides in reducing the number of people living in poverty. Between the years 2013 to 2016, 55.64 million people living in rural areas were lifted out of poverty. Combined poverty relief funds from central and provisional sources reached over 100 billion yuan for the first time in history. As of 2016, 43.5 million people still lived below the nation's poverty line. However, with nearly 1.4 billion people, China's poverty rate is a far cry from numbers in the US.

The US has a population of over 300 million people. Around 45 million live below the federal poverty line. That is about fifteen percent of the population. Meanwhile, the US spends more money on war than the next eight countries combined. Yet not one politician in Washington DC has raised the question of decreasing war spending in order to alleviate poverty in the US.

There is an intimate relationship between war and capitalist-imposed poverty. The fact that US tax dollars are allocated to "defense" instead of social needs only scratches the surface of this relationship. War is a fundamental aspect of the capitalist system. Once capitalism develops to the point where it can no longer maximize profit within national borders, it must look from without to expand the system's tentacles. War means more investment opportunities and markets to exploit for capitalist financial and industrial enterprises. The subsequent death toll and loss of sovereignty for the targets of war is viewed as "collateral damage."

War and exploitation cannot be separated. The US ruling class profits mightily from war. War not only opens up more opportunities for economic penetration, but alsoprovides guaranteed markets to the military industrial complex. Private contractors such as Lockheed and Boeing make billions of dollars selling weapons to compliant regimes around the world. US weapons and private security forces help facilitate the terrain for corporate plunder, whether it is through aid to jihadist proxies in Syria or brutal puppet dictatorships such as Rwanda.

So because the US ruling class is committed to poverty, it is also committed to war. China pursues a different model entirely, one based in socialist economic and political relations with market characteristics. The fundamental difference between the US and China is their relationship to private capital. In the US, private monopoly and finance capital control the levers of the state and wield them in their interests. In China, the levers of the state centrally plan a socialist economywhich dictates private elements of the market. It is this difference that explains why China is able to reduce poverty while the US seems capable of nothing else but war.

*(Image credit: Finnegan/ flickr).