Poverty remains one of the leading
challenges facing the human society. For that, the Nobel Prize committee should
be credited for making this year’s economics award to several scholars working
on poverty alleviation. Their research, however, is challenged by the scholarly
and activist communities in several fronts.
It is also a right time to reflect on poverty alleviation/eradication in China. For its part, China has been widely recognised for moving people out of poverty in hundreds of millions, since the early 1980s.
This process took place, however, mostly as a consequence of China’s rapid
economic development of the last few decades. It is unlikely any country can
achieve such size of poverty eradication without a sustainable period of
economic development. Growing the country out of poverty, and into prosperity,
has been a predominant goal of the government, since the late reform-minded
leader Deng Xiaoping came into power in 1978.
Yet, besides the secular trend of economic development and overall rising living standard of the country, specific programs targeting pocketed poverty were also required, especially for regions and communities far removed from the country’s economically more viable coastal areas.
The state, therefore, has maintained designated poverty-fighting agencies and
programs all through these years. Into the new century, with people living
under poverty line reduced to only a small fraction of the whole population,
the pace of poverty reduction naturally decreased.
Around 2012, the population living poverty line was estimated to be around 70 million, still big in absolute terms but really just a few percentage points of the whole country’s 1.3 billion. And these mostly are founded in mountainous areas, far removed from economic centers – despite China’s big effort of developing roads and railways and other infrastructures, there are indeed still many residential areas cutting off from the modern market sectors.
The country identified a total of 11 areas of “clustered poverty”, which accounted
for a small portion of the national population but about 15 per cent of the
land mass.
Chinese leader Xi Jinping came in office in late 2012 and charged in a strong dose of new momentum into the country’s poverty reduction project, setting the goal of its complete eradication by 2020.
Since then, the country’s “Targeted Poverty Alleviation” Program, a Xi priority
no less important than any others, including the globally much better known
Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), has seen to the removal of roughly 10 million
people out of poverty each year.
Given the remoteness and underdevelopment levels of these concentrated poverty areas, the targeted poverty alleviation relies heavily on government determination and organisation.
As an example, current 2019 year sees the central government allocating 126 billion RMB Yuan (18.5 billion USD) as the special poverty alleviation funds.
But heavier work takes place in the implementation. Work teams of government
employees are formed, to take leave from their jobs and to work in the villages
with identified poor households for extended periods.
For villages that are officially recognised as poor, an additional Party Secretary is assigned to each village, concurrently appointed as the head of the government-sent team, to work closely with the village’s local council.
Apart from the work teams, local residents with a higher stock of human and
social capital and serving in the government-run public sector, such as school
teachers and medical doctors, also take up the responsibility to help one to
five poor households that they were matched with.
They would pay monthly visits to those families, bringing them information and knowledge, as well as technical support. To help the rural household to apply for a government subsidies or micro-finance, for example, would be one kind of such support.
The work teams would stay in the village, most of the time with the poor
households, and return to their city home only on the weekends. Together with
the village cadres, they help design poverty alleviation projects, visit needy
families, and disseminate information, knowledge, and government subsidies.They
would also work in the farms, orchards, or cattle sheds together with the poor
villagers or households they are supposed to provide help to.
A member of such work team who we met in Bobai County of southern China’s Guangxi Autonomous Region said he was very proud to be a part of the grand program. He was grateful to the two-year experience working in the village he was assigned to. This would also, he reasoned, potentially increase his career prospects once returning to his job in the government.
Such a way to fight poverty in the very poor areas, certainly, bears its share
of shortcomings and potential pitfalls. A lot dependent on the synergy between
the Work Team and the locals. Work Team members may help a village household
identifying walnut as a good orchard business- Chinese urbanites now eat huge
amount of walnut each year – for example.
The work team may even work with the household to get things started-- obtaining microfinance to purchase the seeding, and planting and growing them. But after the work team leaves, members of the household may just stop their interest in maintaining and caring the walnut trees. But then, here we can turn to scholarly research on social ecologies and dynamics of village life for help, including those recognised by this year’s Nobel Economics Prize.
This Chinese way of targeted poverty alleviation may not be easily
transferrable to other institutional and cultural settings. Indeed, in many
places in the world, similarly-minded rural development work often comes from
the non-governmental organisations.
That is, every country cannot depend on a state as powerful as the Chinese one, which can require government officials to work and live in poor villages for a long time.
But nonetheless, with the Chinese goal of poverty full elimination apparently
within its reach, the developmental and governmental communities, as well as
academics, may like to pay some useful attention to how this challenge to human
society is tackled in China.
(Dr. Wang Zhengxu is a Professor of Political Science at the School of International Relations and Public Affairs, and Ms. Zhang Yingxue is a student of international politics.)
