Yo this is in reply to that one post weeks back that asked for resources on homelessness in China?

I can't seem to find that post anymore, but hopefully whoever posted it can find this!

Skip to 23:06 for the land reforms, and why homelessness is less of a thing in China. (Tbf the whole thing is worth a watch, it's very informative.)

TLDR? Essentially this: the CPC has come into power, and they have to do something about the massive wealth inequality in China. I'm sure you've seen that tweet of "Muhh egg monopolies". One way they decided to go about it was via land reform. This land is the key to income for many, as chinese society then was not very developed. Farming was the way to make a living, but if most of the land was owned by landlords, what little the farmers earned had to go to the landlords. The land reform was a way for the means of production, the farming land, to go back into the hands of the proletariat.

This is not to say this went perfectly of course. China is massive, and the government was fresh faced, and the oppressed had been very, very angry for a long time. Needless to say, this land reform caused some deaths of the landlords, and overall, the upheaval of the lives of the rich and powerful. It was bloody, but then again, you can't deny that its motivations were in the right places.

All of this leads to the situation where everyone has a piece of their own land in China. Ofc, there isn't "private ownership" but it essentially is their land, forever. This includes the chinese who fled the country, those who were unfairly chased out by the japanese/KMT/even the CPC, etc etc. And so, this means that everyone has a "lao jia", or "old home", where they can return if there ventures outside don't work out. This has some negative connotation ofc, because when you have to return to your "old home", clearly you didn't succeed out there. But the fact is that the poor have places to call their own, and so usually don't have the sleep out in the streets.

I hope this was informative! And again, I'm not saying there is absolutely zero homelessness in China, I'm sure there is. But I can say from first hand experience that it is far less than western countries, especially US and the UK. I'm sure someone can dig out an objective report of this as well.