That's a bit out of context. The full quote radically changes the meaning:
"There are two groups of poor people. One is, you don’t work hard. You deserve to be poor because you don’t work hard. Second is, you work hard but can’t succeed. I think we should help the second group of people."
Which is still ridiculous because the Chinese are the hardest working people I've ever seen. I would assume she and her friends are by far the least hard working demographic in China. It's a just world fallacy if anything.
By hard working Chinese people, are you talking about immigrant Chinese workers or Chinese people in China? You could easily make the argument that migrant workers are historically a hard working demographic, but I don't think the same could be argued for the world's most populous country.
It's a selection bias, because the lazy and stupid ones don't qualify for economic immigration, and there is no easy way to illegally cross the pacific ocean.
There’s a saying, jiu ji bu jiu pin—‘We’ll help you if you have an emergency, but we cannot help you if you’re poor.’
Which is something I think about every time there's a global appeal after an earthquake or tidal wave, yet that contrasts with general indifference or outright hostility to helping with general poverty.
Just need to figure out how to pronounce that phrase correctly so I can drop it into conversation.
I had some trouble finding the characters for that, so in case anyone else is curious -
救急不救贫。
My non-expert analysis, emergency is the characters jiu4ji2. The character jiu4 is save, ji2 is urgent, so save+urgent = emergency. The character bu4 is no, negative, not. The next two characters are jiu4 (save, from before) and pin2 (poor). These don't combine as a single word and are read separately.
With all that in mind, I read it as "It's save+urgent, not save poor". Interesting play on words.
I wonder how they can allow themselves to be rich if they don't work?