Lifted out of poverty” sounds impressive — until you realize poverty just moved to a different postal code

In every Chinese city, there’s a forgotten corner where the country’s “miracle workers” live — domestic migrants from thousands of miles away, sleeping in abandoned buildings and on the street, chasing jobs that barely pay enough to go home.

On paper, China has one of the highest home-ownership rates in the world.
But for millions, those homes exist only on paper — built in villages that were never part of the central plan, where no factory, no hospital, no future was ever designed to reach them.

So they leave on the high speed rails.
They travel across provinces to build someone else’s city, someone else’s dream, while their own hometowns fade from the map.

The government calls it “lifting millions out of poverty.”
But if poverty simply moved — from the countryside to the city margins — was it ever truly lifted, or just reclassified?
The skyscrapers get taller.
The headlines get brighter.
Yet even in an economy that looks unstoppable, the people building it are still left behind.