I feel for you, there is no easy solution:
“ China has a large wealth gap, and we have many people with lower education levels who earn meager wages through manual labor to support their families.”
This is the crux of the issue, people too close to extreme poverty couldn’t care less about the IP institutions that led to mass technological development that they or their child will benefit from.
To me, it’s analogous to how very poor people treat the environment very poorly because they have no mental bandwidth to care. The best way to help in that case is to raise wages.
People are frustrated with the CCP because devaluing the currency is intentional massive wage theft which keeps the population near poverty with the negative aftereffects.
If this goes on long enough (which it might have), humanity at large suffers if people refuse to invest in technology of the future or everyone starts putting up trade barriers because the lost investments are too painful.
> The best way to help in that case is to raise wages.
How to raise those wages without enough money? I think money are created from making products. If you just increase wages without changing anything other (like making more products or more expensive products), it means you increase inflation, which is essentially redistribution of money from everyone to those poorer people.
I think the solution is investment into more high and practical education, so that people actually can work more productively and make more money that way. But current accounting practices seem to not see this way, so money are not allocated for such education.
Increasing wages spurs consumers which generates wealth due to money velocity.
Yes, this goes back to that fundamental and long-debated question: How do we eliminate poverty?
I've studied some sociological and economic theories, and I generally understand that this problem is very difficult to solve.
From my perspective, China's biggest problem right now is actually unequal distribution (especially between different regions), and it's sad to see such a problem in a socialist country.
I really hope our government can truly commit to solving such inter-regional distribution problems, instead of just shouting slogans and doing nothing (which they often do).
I have many classmates from underdeveloped regions who come to Beijing for university and then never return to their hometowns because there are simply no opportunities there. Major resources are concentrated in a few large cities.
I don't know if this is a common characteristic of East Asian countries (Tokyo is also very large, and small cities in Japan are also declining). However, Japan's Gini coefficient is very low, and I think we should learn from Japan in this regard.