"China has enjoyed (and suffered) more than its fair share of social mobility in recent decades. Between 1981 and 2005, over 600m Chinese moved out of poverty, according to Shaohua Chen and Martin Ravallion of the World Bank. Some Chinese of modest means became fabulously rich. But not all social mobility was upwards. From 1949 to the end of the 1960s, China's communists uprooted landlords, expropriated capitalists, and banished bourgeois intellectuals to the hinterlands." (Quoted from article)