From “Four Decades of Poverty Reduction in China”:
“Over the past 40 years, the number of people in China with incomes below US$1.90 per day has fallen by close to 800 million, accounting for close to three-quarters of global poverty reduction since 1980. At China’s current poverty standards, the number of poor people in China fell by 770 million. By any measure, the speed and scale of China’s poverty reduction is historically unprecedented.”
Wow, great work! That’s pretty much what i intuitively expected was the case when i looked a bit into how they were representing the data in their graph and what the World Bank source actually says.
I also went ahead and tried to see what changes if you use a higher poverty line, like something around $5 for instance, and it turns out that in this case we may actually have an increase in total number of people in poverty if you exclude China. Whichever metric you use, it is indisputable that China has done something no one else in the world has managed to do.