The Gap Between Rich and Poor · Full chronicle and history

On October 29, in the parking lot of Yaju Hot Pot Duck in Bincheng District, Binzhou City, Shandong Province, a person in financial distress was seen leaning over a trash can, eating leftover noodles to satisfy their hunger. Netizens used memes such as "It's all Mbappe's fault" to mock the authorities' indifference to people's livelihoods.

On October 24, a Chengdu netizen uploaded a video: a woman in her 60s wearing a reflective vest sat by a flowerbed weeding, while behind her several retired elderly people were dancing. The caption read “On one side is life, on the other side is survival,” sparking heated discussion among netizens.

Recently, a child said in a video that ordinary people remain poor despite a lifetime of effort because wrong values, knowledge and judgment have been instilled in their heads. The remarks were widely agreed with by many netizens.

On October 19, a netizen posted a call arguing that pensions should not be awarded based on merit, pointing out that the essence of social security is mutual aid and protecting the vulnerable; distributing benefits according to "contributions" would leave elderly people at the bottom with even less security and widen the gap between rich and poor.

Data released by Argentina's National Institute of Statistics and Census shows that the country's poverty rate jumped from 28.2% in the second half of last year to 32.3% in the first half of this year.

In June, the IMF officially adjusted the international extreme poverty line to $3 per day, the extreme poverty line for middle‑income countries to $4.2 per day, and the poverty line for high‑income countries to $8.3 per day.

On August 10, a netizen in Guangdong filmed a female sanitation worker pausing during her break to watch retired people her own age singing and dancing in a square, her expression full of envy and helplessness at the vast income gap.

As poverty-alleviation propaganda was being published, several elderly people at the bottom of society said they could not afford meat, saw no hope in life, and suffered too much just living; even past the age of 70, they still had to survive by scavenging and selling vegetables.

An Oxfam report from October 2024 (using data from the first quarter of 2024) shows that the median monthly income of Hong Kong's poorest 10% of households was HK$1,600, down 54% from HK$3,500 in 2019, while the richest 10% earned 101,000; the gap between rich and poor widened from 34.3 times to 81.9 times, the poverty rate was 2.2%, and about 1.39 million people lived below the poverty line. The government's poverty report has not been updated since 2021.