11 mind-blowing facts about China's economy

If you think the world's biggest retailer is Walmart, think again. If you think Amazon is the biggest online retailer, wrong again. Both titles go to Alibaba.

China's online sales giant moves almost three times as much merchandise as Amazon and, when you count its subsidiaries, it has inched past Walmart as the biggest retailer. Alibaba is making a foray into the American e-commerce market with AliExpress, which is already the sixth-biggest online-shopping site in the US.

The number of billionaires in China (388) is a little more than half that of the US (680). And, collectively, US billionaires have almost three times as much money as those in China. But China is coming up fast, adding 55 new billionaires in 2017, the most of any country (though a 2018 downturn knocked 49 billionaires down to mere millionaires).

The richest man in the world, Jeff Bezos, with a fortune of $131 billion, owns the second biggest online retail business, Amazon. Jack Ma, CEO of Alibaba, the world's largest retailer, is only No. 21 on the Forbes billionaires list, behind people like Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, and Mark Zuckerberg. Ma's net worth is slightly less than $40 billion.

According to McKinsey, there were 7.6 million Chinese families wealthy enough to buy luxury brands in 2016. Millennials are driving this trend, which added up to $73 billion in spending in 2018, or nearly a third of the world's market for high-end and high-status products.

For years, communist China had a closed economy that did almost no international trade. According to World Bank data, exports accounted for less than 3% of its GDP in 1970. By 2010, that figure had risen to over 26%, down from a high of 36% in 2006.

China's booming economy hasn't just created billionaires, it has also helped raise living standards for working people. Between 2002 and 2012, China's average household income rose from $987 per year to $4,273, an increase of over 400%. By 2013, that figure was up to $4,806, almost five times as much as in 2002.

The World Bank poverty line, globally, is an income of $1.90 per day. By 2015, only 0.7% of the Chinese population were at or below the poverty level, with about 9.9 million in this category out of a population of 1.35 billion.

China's own national poverty line is higher, and even by that metric, only 3.1% of the population — 30.5 million people — lives in poverty.

Meanwhile, in the US, 12.3% of the population falls below the national poverty line, which in the 48 contiguous states is $12,490 a year for an individual or $25,750 a year for a family of four, according to the Department of Health and Human Services. That's 39.7 million Americans living in poverty.

China's one-child policy has resulted in an extreme gender imbalance. There are about 34 million more Chinese men than women. In a society that calls an unmarried adult a "leftover man," this poses a problem.

One solution: hire a date. Newsweek reported that Chinese singles can hire a date for as little as 15 cents an hour, up to $288 an hour (sex not included).

Read more: Chinese men are using apps to hire fake girlfriends, and the story of a woman who got 700 offers illustrates the country's growing marriage problem

Lunar New Year is celebrated for a whole week each year, usually sometime in February. Many people travel home and buy gifts. Chinese consumers spent the equivalent of $149 billion in 2019, according to Bloomberg.

China has long been the main destination for black-market endangered-animal parts, prized for their medicinal value. Ground rhino horn was supposed to cure fevers and reduce blood pressure. Tigers were thought to protect you from being cursed, and the parts from one tiger could sell for as much as $50,000, according to Smithsonian Magazine.

For many years, China was part of a global effort to stop the poaching of threatened species. But, last year, China created a legal market for farmed tiger and rhino parts. Conservationists fear this could open the door to more poaching of these highly endangered animals.

13 mind-blowing facts about Russia's economy