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At the time of this writing, I have lived in China for almost 10 years, both in Beijing and in the small city of Yuxi (pronounced like the English words You-She) in the southwestern province of Yunnan. Having grown up in the United States, lived in many US states, plus 2 years in Germany, I was surprised to conclude that the quality-of-life standard in China is about equal to that in the United States or Germany. In many ways, working-class and some middle-class Chinese people now live better than their equivalents in the US. No American visiting China in 1980, 1990, or 2000 would have proposed that the quality of life of the average person in China was preferable or even roughly equal to that in the United States. Even in 2010, that proposition would have been implau¬sible to me, though it would have been worth consideration. In 2025, after observa¬tions of life in China, I do argue that the two countries now have fundamentally equivalent quality-of-life standards. How could it be that the quality-of-life in China even comes close to that in the US? Using exchange-rate adjusted GDP, US per capita GDP in 2023 was $81,695 and China’s GDP per capita was $12,614, according to the World Bank.1 Even using purchasing power parity, which attempts to adjust for domestic prices within each country, the World Bank estimates the US purchasing power parity for 2023 at $81,695 per person and China’s 2023 PPP at $24,558 per person, seeming to imply that Americans are more than three times better off than Chinese.2 This implication is not consistent with my first-hand observations. A person making, say, 7000 or even 3000 RMB per month (roughly 1000 or even 400 US dollars at 2025 exchange rates), can, in many areas of China, live quite a good life. Anyone earning dollar-equivalent salaries in the US would be desperately poor. My rough observation is that a Chinese worker who earns 5000 RMB has an equivalent lifestyle quality to one who makes between 3000 and 4000 dollars per month in the US. Depending on family circumstances and location, this worker is not at all well-off and really does not achieve secure middle-class status but avoids poverty. Thus, the “quality-of-life exchange rate” is 1.2 to 1.6 RMB per dollar, not the market exchange rate of about 7 RMB per dollar. As explained in Chap. 2 below, this does not in any way mean that China is somehow manipulating the exchange rate. The difference is mostly explained by the special role of the dollar as the international reserve currency. The value of the dollar is determined by international capital flows, not by international goods and services trade and certainly not by relative quality of life.