China hasn't been a 3rd world country for some time. It isn't even close. Sure there are massive pockets of poverty (with 1 billion people, there are massive pockets of everything)...but visit India or parts of Africa if you want to see what 3rd world is.
I supposed you could call China not a 3rd world, but I've been to China, Nepal, and parts of Africa, and a lot of rural China looks like the poor parts of the other two. How people in poverty live in China is still quite a bit below how the impoverished live in western countries
Ummm... China is not a third world country. It was a second world country. In fact the whole point of the definition of first/second/third world revolves around China, the USSR, and their allies being the second world.
What you mean to say is China is a developing country. Please leave the old out dated and irrelevant cold war propaganda terminology in the past where it belongs. Remember, Switzerland and Sweden are both canonical examples of third world countries: they were allied with neither the UK/US block or the China/USSR block. Likewise, just because a country is a first world country doesn't mean it's rich -- some of the poorest countries in the world are first world countries, like Namibia.
First/second/third world is not an economic concept. Both Namibia and the Philippines are first world countries. Both Switzerland and Sweden (and Austria too) are third world countries. China -- by the very definition of the first/second/third world -- is a second world country.
Please use the proper terms: developed and developing.
What do you mean by "first world country?" The terms first/second/third world were originally names used to distinguish countries aligned either with the capitalist west, communist east, or neither (which typically were less developed). Now it's used more as a synonym for "developed country," which is a category that certainly included the Soviet Union (there wasn't a lot of free speech there, to say the least).
I don't think the Chinese government cares about western political values, and it'll probably be satisfied with whatever economic development it can get without them.
I know what you are saying, and I get "China is still a developing country" clobbered into my skull almost everyday. Third world just sounds better in contrast to first world, especially when prefixed by "problems"; there are no subreddits for developed and developing world problems, but they exist for first and third world problems (https://www.reddit.com/r/thirdworldproblems and https://www.reddit.com/r/firstworldproblems). It seems that third-world has evolved past its old cold war meaning to just mean "developing world"; here is what Google says on its title card for a search on "third world" (https://www.google.com/search?q=third+world+problems&oq=thir...):
Third World
noun
the developing countries of Asia, Africa, and Latin America.
> Over the last few decades since the fall of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, the term Third World has been used interchangeably with the least developed countries, the Global South, and developing countries to describe poorer countries that have struggled to attain steady economic development, a term that often includes "Second World" countries like Laos. This usage, however, has become less preferred in recent years.[1]
Remember that words can change meaning over the years, even if they do not remain true to their old meanings. This is just another way our language evolves. An attachment to the old meaning of a term is usually not going to sway people's opinion of the word's definition.
"Third world" is a nonsense term that gives a completely misleading picture of global wealth distribution and helps to perpetuate negative stereotypes [0]. China's PPP GDP per capita is almost exactly the global average and higher than many Eastern European countries. They are practically the definition of a middle-income country.
How would American companies react if their website suddenly started showing messages celebrating Eid al-Fitr for no apparent reason? Would you expect them to blithely laugh it off as harmless festive high-jinks?
I would say almost no completely third world countries, but there are large parts of many, if not most countries that are very much severely underdeveloped or riddled with systemic corruption (third world by the classical definition), This is sometimes even found in the middle of some of the worlds most highly developed nations (cough, cough, Baltimore, New Orleans, etc). To what percentage of a country's human-inhabited area these third world tracts extend is essentially based on how pervasive or deeply rooted bad government and systemic daily corruption are. But i'd argue that in any country where the percentage of underdevelopment goes over 50% you can loosely claim third world status.
Also, don't be fooled by the main business/living hubs of the glittering major cities of the world into thinking that most places are now mostly first world: Sure, you can travel from Bangkok to Delhi to Cairo and then Mexico City and in all of them spend days inside an urban area that's remarkably comparable to a normal European or U.S city's. However, these bubbles only represent a small fraction of the totality of these places, and much of that total outside of said bubbles is very, very different in how it looks and works compared to how the majority outer parts of most first world cities look or work. This without even going into any detail about difference in the countryside and smaller provincial towns that aren't specifically tourist hubs.
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