What's funny is that the original source is using the 300 million number to argue against market liberalization lol. It clearly states multiple times that the number of "vagrant" or actually unhoused people is somewhere under 17M because that's how many people received assistance between 2012 and 2019. Probably significantly lower if someone received assistance more than once in those 7 years.

Using the 300m number is basically trying to call to attention the Chinese precariat. Urban peasants who still don't have the same treatment as urban natives. This is something they tried to fix with the Cultural Revolution, but it still exists.

If you count the Chinese precariat (employed and houses, but in unideal conditions) you have to count the precariat of every nation. Which means you'd have to include Americans who are at or near the poverty line meaning at least 100,000,000 people (making $54k or less for a family of 4).

Meaning China's precariat is actually a lower percentage of their population than America's.

This paper illustrates perfectly the internet debate bro together with the entire way capitalism has no shame in being dishonest.

I read a bit so far and this is actualy an interesting paper but as you can imagine in people read the title, control+f a number and go post as if it supports their argument.

The authors are trying to explain explore the traditional concept of family and housing in Chinese history and then compare and contrast that with the modern world, noticing along the way the undeniable westernization of Chinese society and the concept of housing and family, I'll quote what they want actualy want to discuss. I know its long, I suggest reading the paper itself but here are just some of the good parts that explain what they're talking about.

The hundreds of millions of workers who came to cities from the countryside are homeless only in a very specialized sense. They have a place to live, but their living conditions are crowded and substandard. Above all, they are precarious. With little warning, officials may deem their area suitable for the construction of modern housing, and their tenements will be demolished, forcing them to find other urban ac- commodations or return to worse poverty in the countryside. ... Perhaps they are not literally homeless until the bulldozers come to destroy their meagre homes, but they are constantly on the edge of homelessness. They live in a gray zone in which it is virtually impossi- ble to build the sort of stable life that middle-class legal residents take for granted.

If this is not homelessness, then another term needs to be invented to encompass precariousness on this level.

Another aspect of homelessness that eludes statisticians is the social relationships that represented the long-term population displacement that Chinese peasants have undergone since 1978. Homelessness in- volves shattering of human relationships just as much as it means exposure to the elements, broken sewer pipes, or indefensible space.

In most countries, the loss of social relationships is the beginning of the path that ends with a person sleeping on cardboard. Although China has few visible street sleepers, there are tens of millions of households torn apart, just as there were in times of war in the last century. In the countryside, there are 60 million children growing up without adequate care because their parents are working in a city and the grandparents are too old to provide for the children in the absence of a supportive community.

Thus, the absence of a “home” in China is different from the absence of a “house.” A home is a place of belonging that provides identity and security. The left-behind children of China are thus homeless, even if they are not houseless.

As you can see further their aim was not to aimlessly critique

The government has not ignored the problem. But it has responded only to the superficial problem of vagrancy, which is only a tiny por- tion of the population under stress. The government now provides services to beggars who live on the street through rescue centers. It can provide physical necessities (clothing, food, accommodation, medical treatment, and bus tickets) to those facing immediate crises.

On a broader level, China has proposed a comprehensive fight against poverty in the form of a national policy measure to eradicate the root cause of homelessness in rural poverty. In terms of basic necessities, including education and medical care, China has reduced the rural poor population from 100 million in 2012 to 16.6 million in 2018 under the current measure of poverty, and the incidence of pov- erty dropped from 10.2 percent to 1.7 percent (Huang 2019). These local solutions have effectively addressed the problem of homeless begging, but they have not achieved a significant reduction in the “unaffiliated” status of the new homeless population.

There is a whole section of Chinese history I'll just quote what comes near the end, it's very interesting

The preceding discussion explains why homelessness is an inherently social phenomenon in China that cannot be understood in strictly individualistic terms. In Western societies, each person is expected to act alone and take full responsibility for him- or herself. The individual is expected to leave home in early adulthood and find a new path in the world. The Chinese worldview inverts that expectation by treating “home” as the social center around which individual life revolves. The idea of leaving home to start life on one’s own is unthinkable because that would entail the annihilation of the social bonds that create “home.”

President Xi Jinping has recognized the structural homeless population as one cost of mod- ernization. He has begun the process of using the inherited concept of “family - tian xia” to explore new types of urban-rural integration mechanisms as a way to restore a sense of “belonging” to the “home- less people” who have lost the ties to their social and cultural roots.

China’s urban governance system has shifted from the danwei system based on work affiliation to a community system that emphasizes organic connections. For migrant workers, “ant families,” and other groups living on the social periphery, this represents the possibility to feel human warmth and kindness and to develop an active public life. In effect, it means the state is seeking to find a way to replicate the sense of being “at home” in the city for all who feel displaced.

I recommend actualy reading entirely or most of it, but the gist is this is Chinese researches being honest about the social transformation in China, when they mean homeless people they explicitly say they're not talking about any western sense of the word "homeless".

Not like the paid ops that maintain the wiki will give a shit though, you got a paper, you got a "number", that's good enough.

Thanks for the link! Def worth at least a skim.