Long before the United States was even a thing, China saw itself as the civilized center of
the universe.
For hundreds of years it was indeed home to a magnificent civilization, way ahead of those
soon-to-be-brilliant European powerhouses.
When the Europeans started exploring the world in the 15th century in what we now call the,
“Age of Discovery”, the Chinese considered Europe nothing but an outback of sorts.
But scholars tell us its self-imposed isolation was to be its undoing, and soon those European
countries would become the center of the world.
The United States would get on the map, and many years later some people would forget
China’s incredible history.
Some people considered it as an uncivilized outback.
Right now these two nations are the economic behemoths, but how do the people match up?
Before we start comparing folks let’s just have a look at how many people actually live
in these nations.
These are estimates of course, and remember that many people in both countries don’t
make the head count.
Nonetheless, according to the live numbers right now given by Worldometers, the USA has
a population of 329,966,970.
China has a population of 1,436,364,105.
We are talking about mainland China today we should say.
It will get too confusing if we try and compare the U.S. with mainland China as well as say,
Hong Kong and Taiwan.
If you want to know China’s relationship to Taiwan, let’s just say it’s complicated
and you should do some research.
As for Hong Kong, we guess you’ve been reading a lot about Hong Kong and mainland China relations
of late.
According to the International Monetary Fund's World Economic Outlook Database in 2019 the
GDP for the United States was $20.49 trillion.
This was the largest GDP in the world.
Second was China at $13.41 trillion.
The gap according to analysts is going to shorten year-by-year as we head into the near
future.
But then you’ve got something called GDP based on PPP (purchasing power parity) and
if you look at that, China has the biggest economy.
The USA was again $20.49 trillion but China’s was $25.27 trillion, according to the IMF.
The simple way to explain the difference is that nominal GDP is based on the currencies
of countries converted into the U.S. dollar.
When we look at PPP we take an approach based on what’s called a “basket of goods.”
Let’s say a basket in the U.S. costs six bucks but in China costs only 4 bucks.
What does that mean?
Well, if both countries sold everything they owned the U.S. would get more cash.
But what if they didn’t trade and just made stuff?
That would mean China could make more stuff, and that’s why it’s sometimes called the
biggest economy in the world.
But we are talking about people today, not countries.
The reason we are discussing money in the first place is because we want to know what
each person would have if all the cash was shared.
We call this purchasing power per capita, which basically means per head.
Then you have GDP (nominal) purchasing power per capita and GDP (purchasing power parity)
per capita.
Please don’t give up on us if this is starting to get make you frustrated, we’ll get to
the simple stuff soon.
In the USA if you look at nominal GDP and divide it out you get about $62,000.
There are a lot more people in China so their nominal GDP per capita is close to $10,000.
If we look at PPP per capita China’s goes up to around $20,000 and the USA’s stays
the same.
Does this mean life is much easier in the USA?
We looked at statistics released by China’s National Bureau of Statistics in 2019 and
this is what we found.
If people in the country earned $295 a month it was said to be in a “low income” category.
We are converting Chinese yuan to the U.S dollar here.
If they earned anywhere from $295 to $740 a month they were said to be in a middle income
bracket and if they earned $740 to $1,480 their income was said to be relatively high.
Anyone earning more than that was a baller.
Ok, so now we went to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and we found that the median income
in the country for 2019 was around $3,600 a month.
If you don’t know, median is not average.
What it means is the number right in the middle.
So, half have more than $3,600 and half have less.
That would make a lot of people in the USA ballers in China, but we should say here that
when China released those figures and categories a lot of Chinese people complained.
There’s a big difference in cost of living in downtown Shanghai and a rural town in the
hinterlands of the country.
Minimum wage in China by the way is set locally, so in Shanghai it might be $360 a month but
in somewhere not as expensive it might be $160 a month.
The U.S. might change from state to state, too, so it could be $7.25 an hour or it might
be $14.00 per hour.
Per month that might be around $1,200 to $2,250.
As for working hours, the Labor Law of People's Republic of China says people should not work
more than 44 hours a week.
According to the U.S Bureau of Labor Statistics that’s about the average in the USA.
We say average, because we found reports that some folks in the U.S. were doing 12 hour
shifts, six days a week in factories.
Some people have more than one job, too.
We found in the U.S that you can legally work more than 40 hours a week, but by law you
must be paid more by the hour for the extra hours.
So, the U.S. citizen seems to earn more cash in general.
By the way, when the World Bank ranked countries in 2018 in terms of inequality, the U.S. and
China weren’t that far apart.
But then we looked at one Quality of Life index the USA was placed in 13th, while China
was placed in 67th.
So, do people in the USA have a better quality of life?
Well, it’s just so hard to say.
It’s hard to break down.
China has more poverty, but the USA has its pockets of unemployment, crime and addiction.
We’re just not going to go there, and will concentrate on other matters.
Believe it or not, though, there is something called a World Happiness Report and it’s
compiled each year by the United Nations.
At the top for the last report was Finland, followed by Denmark and Norway.
Even the Brits were in 15th, and they seem to be experts in being disgruntled.
Where were the USA and China?
The answer is the U.S. was ranked in 19th and China was ranked all the way down in 93rd
place.
How is this list compiled?
Does the UN look at how many people are smiling?
No, they look at areas such as spending ability, social support, life expectancy, corruption
and freedom to make life choices.
Life expectancy in China by the way is 76 for both men and women.
In the U.S. it’s 79.
That’s better than China, but for a developed nation not very good.
You might live longer in the USA but you also might live some of that time in a jail or
a prison.
A 2018 report from the Bureau of Justice Statistics said that for every 100,000 people living
in the USA there are 655 of them doing time behind bars.
In China per 100,000 there are only 118 people behind bars.
Does this mean with all the people locked up in the U.S. the country is much safer than
China?
No, not at all, is the short answer.
We have done a safety comparison of the two countries before and there is no doubt more
to fear in the USA in terms of crime.
Saying that, if you are a Chinese person you are living in the country that is widely known
as the surveillance state that tops all surveillance states.
The day we write this, The New York Times opened an article with this paragraph:
“Chinese authorities are knitting together old and state-of-the-art technologies — phone
scanners, facial-recognition cameras, face and fingerprint databases and many others
— into sweeping tools for authoritarian control.”
Ok, so the U.S. has spied on its own citizens from time to time and whistleblowers might
find themselves in difficult positions, but we will say that the average Chinese citizen
has more to worry about when it comes to a Big brother.
Folks in the USA have much more freedom to vent their feelings; to protest, to just get
lost in society.
We should say here something of importance, and that’s that the “individual” right
in the USA is taken seriously.
In China people are much more aware that they are part of a whole, working for the whole.
How do Americans and Chinese compare physically though?
Let’s start with height.
In the USA the average height for a woman is 5 feet 4 inches (162.56 centimeters) and
for a man it’s 5 feet 9 inches (175.26 centimeters).
In China for a man it’s 5 feet 6 1⁄2 inches (169.5 cm) for a woman and 5 feet 2 inches
(158.0 cm).
Expect to see a lot taller people in the USA.
You can also expect to see many folks in the USA growing horizontally, too.
The average weight for a woman in the USA is 168.4 pounds (76.4 kg) and the average
weight for a man is 195.8 pounds (88.8 kg).
In China the average weight for a woman is 125 pounds (57 kg) and 66.2 kg and for males
145 pounds (66 kg).
What about beliefs, as in religion.
Well, you might not know that the vast majority in China identify as being non-religious.
That doesn’t mean they might not have a kind of folk religion, but they don’t identify
with any of the biggies.
You might call Taoism a religion and also a philosophy, but then you might call Buddhism
that, too.
In China you will find Buddhists, and Christians, and Muslims, but they are a minority.
There’s also Confucianism, but that’s more of an ethical guide than a religion per
se.
Getting the numbers for who follows what religion in China we will admit was problematic for
us because every resource told a different story.
It wasn’t so hard in the USA.
The vast majority of people are Christian, followed by a sprinkling of Judaism, Mormonism,
and fewer people belonging to Hinduism, Buddhism and Sikhism.
Quite a lot of people identify as not really having a religion at all.
We can find one area where the Chinese and American people are quite similar, and that
is the fact marriage rates have dropped significantly in the past 30 years.
If they do get married, the average age for the first marriage for men in the USA is 29.2
and it’s 27.1 for women.
In China, the average age for first marriage for men is 27.1 and 24.9 for women.
The average age gap in the marriage for both countries is around the same at two years.
Around 30 percent of Chinese couples will divorce and around 42 percent of American
couples will divorce.
It’s also much more likely in China that the family will have some influence as to
who you marry, while in the USA there is a bit more freedom.
There is also much more chance that a Chinese man will have a mistress, but we won’t go
into that today.
China is changing and couples are changing.
There are some reports that young people are getting married and the family has less influence
on the marriage.
Some reports state that people are marrying with the absence of things such as a ring,
a car, a home, etc.
Others just don’t bother getting married because it’s too expensive.
Some people are now writing that marriage traditions in China are waning and younger
people are opting to fall in love more in line with Western cultures.
So, we’ll finish on something where the two countries and people are getting closer.
Isn’t that lovely.
We think now you deserve something funny, like some of the most amusing videos we have
made.
Both are comparisons, but let’s just say they are kinda of off the wall.
Make the choice and click on the video Average American vs Average North Korean or our other
comparison video Gorilla vs Bear - Who Would Win?