Farmers and herdsmen claim sheep distributed to them by local authorities as part of poverty relief measures on October 16, 2014, in Hanjiazhuangzi Village of Barkol County, Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region. [Photo: China Today]
State leaders from 189 countries that attended the Millennium Summit in 2000 adopted the UN Millennium Declaration, and so committed to helping achieve the eight millennium development goals. The first was to eradicate extreme poverty and hunger. In an interview with Chinese media in 2011, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said that China''s "remarkable progress" had "contributed to our global MDG results," notably in helping the world to "lift at least half of the extremely poor people out of poverty."
Statistical data show that during the period 1990-2010, 526 million people in China rose above the absolute poverty level, accounting for 75.7 percent of the world reduction during this period. Last March, Bill Gates, president of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, said in an interview with Chinese media while attending the Boao Forum for Asia that the rich experience China has accumulated in poverty eradication should be promoted in African and other Asian countries.
Intensified poverty reduction
Professor Hu Angang of Tsinghua University believes that China''s impressive poverty alleviation progress can be ascribed to the following three reasons: First, China has listed poverty reduction among the key development goals included in its national development plan. Second, China''s sustained economic growth has been a decisive factor in the dramatic drop in its poverty-stricken population. Third, China constantly improves its national poverty alleviation strategy and policy system.
China has intensified its efforts in recent years. In 2011, it raised its poverty standard for farmers to a yearly per capita net income of RMB 2,300 – 92 percent higher than that set in 2009. People living below this poverty line became entitled to national support. After raising the bar, China''s poverty population rose in 2011 to 128 million, as compared to 26.88 million in 2010.
Superficially, the new standard is equal to one dollar per capita per day, which is still below the World Bank standard of US $1.25 per capita per day. However, as former director of the State Council Leading Group Office of Poverty Alleviation and Development (LGOP) Fan Xiaojian explained, as the new standard is based on the international purchasing power parity approach, it is tantamount to US $1.8 per capita per day. The new standard signifies the Chinese government''s endeavor to provide more support to people living in absolute poverty and to poverty-stricken areas.
Accurate assessment
In July 2014, Luo Jinmao, a farmer from Heiyan Village, Jiangkou County of Guizhou Province, completed a 40-item form. It set down the fundamental situation of his family, causes of its poverty, his living conditions, the people responsible for support, and desired support measures. After being certified as head of a poverty-stricken household, Luo received a micro-loan to cultivate a vineyard.
People like Luo who have been living in poverty benefit significantly from China''s targeted poverty alleviation measures, which started in 2014. Upon registering, they receive personalized assistance. The government has dispatched nationwide more than 100,000 working teams that carry out registration and identification of people living in poverty and poverty-stricken villages. Guizhou Province, where Luo lives, has the highest poor population. Of its villages, 9,000 are classified as poverty-stricken, and 7.45 million of its population as living in poverty.
In the words of China Poverty Alleviation and Development Center director Cao Hongmin, the advantage of targeted poverty alleviation measures is that assistance can be given directly to relevant villages and people. Cao explained that through the LGOP website, authorities and donors can accurately pinpoint the needs of poverty-stricken villages and households by accessing online the data available, such as reasons for their plight, plans to emerge from it, and the kind of assistance needed. Targeted measures and personalized assistance programs can then be applied.
Over the past 30-plus years since China''s reform and opening-up policy came into effect, China has effectively advanced poverty alleviation by teaming up institutional aid suppliers with specific regions, and pairing better-off provinces/municipalities in the east with their worse-off peers in the west. Meanwhile, it encourages the participation of private enterprises, social organizations and individual citizens, according to Cao.
Since 1986, China has bonded governmental agencies and state-owned enterprises with poverty-stricken counties, whereby the former extend various forms of assistance to the latter. Today, around 300 central authority agencies have this aid partnership with 592 counties. Provincial, municipal and county-level governments also carry out poverty alleviation this way.
Poverty alleviation coordination between China''s eastern and western regions started in 1996. A poverty alleviation coordination system between 18 developed eastern provinces and municipalities and 10 western provinces, autonomous regions and municipalities has since taken shape. It features government assistance, cooperation between enterprises, public support, and personnel backing.
Two disabled women at work in a field at the the poverty alleviation base for the disabled in Zouping County, Shandong Province. [Photo: China Today]
Coastal Fujian Province in southeastern China has forged a couplet-assistance with Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region. Over the past 20 years, Fujian has helped Ningxia lift hundreds of thousands people out of poverty. Their mode of assistance has upgraded from the early stage of simply appropriating tens of millions of yuan as a fund earmarked for assistance. It has since advanced to building roads, wells, and demonstration villages, supporting local farming households'' adoption of modern agricultural technologies, helping the relocation of 350,000 farmers to more livable locales and boosting local cultural industry and tourism development. The constantly expanding cooperation of this couplet-assistance mode, featuring assistance projects, industrial coordination, poverty alleviation through science and technology, labor training, export of labor, enterprise participation, and public support, has thus formed.
China''s private enterprises are also active in the country''s poverty alleviation and reduction drive. Over the last 20 years, the China Society for Promotion of the Guangcai Program, sponsored by private entrepreneurs, has donated RMB 600 billion to more than 40,000 poverty alleviation projects, trained more than 8.6 million people, created 10 million jobs, and helped more than 20 million people emerge from poverty.
Shared experience
The international community has given substantial support to China''s poverty reduction drive. As China steadily gains poverty reduction headway, more developing countries and international organizations want to learn from China''s experience in this field. China has proactively participated in world poverty reduction and tried to establish a platform for international exchanges and cooperation on which to share its poverty alleviation experience with other developing countries, according to deputy director of the LGOP international cooperation division Liu Shuwen.
Over the last decade, China has organized more than 100 seminars, sharing its poverty eradication experience with more than 1,500 representatives from 100 countries. Multiple exchange project brands have been shaped in this process. They include the Global Poverty Reduction and Development Forum, China-ASEAN Forum on Social Development and Poverty Reduction, China-Africa Poverty Reduction and Development Conference, and ASEAN + 3 Village Leaders Exchange Program.
In May 2014, at the Fifth China-Africa Poverty Reduction and Development Conference (held yearly), China and the African Union jointly issued the China-Africa cooperation guidelines on poverty reduction. Its aim was to discuss poverty eradication strategies and policy, to compare notes on poverty alleviation and national development, and to learn from each other through this platform.
China-Africa cooperation on poverty reduction has in fact reached the grass- roots level. In 2011, China''s International Poverty Reduction Center set up a poverty-reduction training facility in a remote village in Tanzania, more than 300 km from the country''s largest city Dar-es-Salaam. The facility provides local farmers with technical training and offers them technical support. Their efforts have doubled the local corn yield per unit of area. In addition, the facility has also built latrines and roads, and given local villagers access to clean well water. Former LGOP director Fan Xiaojian holds that China-Africa cooperation in African villages serves as an example of how to avoid the Chinese experience of unpreparedness for African conditions.
In November 2014, at the 17th ASEAN Plus China, Japan and ROK Summit, Chinese Premier Li Keqiang proposed making poverty eradication a cooperation priority among participating countries. Premier Li further pledged that China would offer RMB 100 million in funds to carry out poverty reduction in rural areas of the region and establish exemplary poverty reduction cooperation bases, in a bid to achieve the goal of no starvation in East Asia.
On February 17, 2010, then UN assistant secretary-general Ajay Chhibber observed at a press conference held at the Asian Development Bank headquarters that China had remarkably reduced its poverty-stricken population and hence also had the capability and experience to help other developing countries realize their poverty reduction goals. This signified an important role for China in world poverty reduction. As a main force in the world''s advance towards achieving the millennium development goals, China contributed substantially to steady global progress in this regard, making it possible for the world to realize the goals before 2015.
China has thus achieved the millennium development goals ahead of the assigned date. Its efforts to share its experience with other countries and regions in poverty alleviation nonetheless continue.