Marty Harris is an assistant digital editor at the Lowy Institute.
The following graph is from the UN's 2013 Millennium Development Goals Report:
Little comment is needed on this, except to say that despite rising income and urban-rural inequality in China, the number of people living in extreme poverty there declined from 60% of the population in 1990 to 12% in 2010. The remarkable decline in extreme poverty levels in Southeast Asia also should not be ignored, going from 45% in 1990 to 14% in 2010.