China has 900M people making less than $400/month, and 600M people making less than $100/month. relative GDP is a joke, go to China to see what most of them are eating (hint: it's unsafe food filled with chemicals, or its mostly carbs) and where these people are living (hint: it's shoddy constructed condos or run down farm houses)
Not sure why you have something against the flyover states. I'm sure there's more shoddily constructed condos in Florida/California/New York per capita than there is in the Midwest. Same goes for cheap high calorie food.
Of course, the same can probably be said about the large population centers in China too. More people concentrated in one area tends to mean more poverty in that area and all the things that come with it.
The parallel is that there are rich and poor? It is unscrupulous to argue in imprecise, binary terms while ignoring the difference in scale. People in flyover states are not making only $400/mo or even occupying that same societal equivalent of China in America.
