China helping lift Africans out of poverty
Making joint efforts with Africa to eliminate poverty and achieve common development is a responsibility we should shoulder today for future generations, said Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi, during an address at the Africa- China High- Level Dialogue and Think Tank Forum. Africa needs to lift 400 million out of poverty, and China still has over 40 million living below the poverty line, he noted during the address in the Ethiopian capital of Addis Ababa on Wednesday. He called eliminating poverty the common goal that Chinese and African people are working for and an indispensable demand for human progress.
Both China and African nations are developing countries that once suffered from colonialism and invasion by Western powers.
Currently, they are both confronted with the task of poverty relief and development. China, which has enjoyed rapid development over the past decades, has the responsibility and obligation to help its African partners in the endeavor of poverty alleviation and development.
Back in May 2014, Chinese Premier Li Keqiang said in his speech at the opening ceremony of the 24th World Economic Forum on Africa in Abuja, Nigeria, “Promoting mutually beneficial cooperation between China and Africa, with a combined population of more than 2.3 billion, contributes to the well- being of the two peoples and more balanced growth of the world economy. This in itself is the most significant inclusive growth in the world.”
China’s sincere, open and mutually beneficial cooperation with Africa benefits nearly one third of the global population, which is of great significance to the balanced development of the world economy and the overall progress of human society.
To further reduce poverty worldwide, China has spared no effort to completely eliminate poverty within the country before the end of 2020 and attached great importance to exchanges and cooperation with other developing countries, in particular African states.
When Chinese President Xi Jinping attended the UN Sustainable Development Summit 2015 in New York, he announced that China would set up an Assistance Fund for South- South Cooperation and pledge $ 2 billion in its first phase to support the developing world in putting in place their post- 2015 development agenda.
During the Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation in mid- May, Xi again unveiled a wide spectrum of substantial aid and assistance programs. “We will provide emergency food aid worth 2 billion yuan ($ 292 million) to developing countries along the Belt and Road and make an additional contribution of $ 1 billion to the Assistance Fund for South- South Cooperation. China will launch 100 ‘ happy home’ projects, 100 poverty alleviation projects and 100 health care and rehabilitation projects in countries along the Belt and Road. China will provide relevant international organizations with $ 1 billion to implement cooperation projects that will benefit the countries along the Belt and Road,” he said at the highprofile meeting, the first of its kind, in Beijing.
Since the African continent, which has the biggest number of developing countries, is confronted with the toughest task in poverty relief, helping lift them from poverty has been a leitmotif of Sino- African relations over the past 50 years. In the 1960s and 1970s when China was struggling with its own distressed economy, it still managed to build the 1,860- kilometer Tanzania- Zambia Railway at the cost of around $ 455 million.
For the past decades, China, with increasing economic power, beefed up support for Africa in development aid, economic and trade cooperation and experience sharing. It also helped the continent benefit as much from globalization as possible and let its voices heard on the world stage. China even set “Supporting Industrialization in Africa and Least Developed Countries” as a G20 initiative during the G20 Hangzhou summit last September, writing it into the G20 communiqué for the first time in history.
Against the backdrop of prevailing protectionism across the West and the surging trend of anti- globalization, China proposed the Belt and Road initiative in 2013, conveying the expectation to share the development achievements of China and globalization and build a community of common destiny with the rest of the world including Africa.
At the Johannesburg Summit and the sixth Ministerial Conference of the Forum on China- Africa Cooperation in 2015, Xi pledged $ 60 billion for African development under a three- year plan covering 10 cooperation areas: industrialization, agricultural modernization, infrastructure, financial services, green development, trade and investment facilitation, poverty reduction and public welfare, public health, people- to- people exchanges, and peace and security.
Wang Yi said at the forum on poverty reduction at the African Union headquarters that the Chinese government and the Chinese people have been pressing for reforms and opening- up under the leadership of the Communist Party of China, in addressing poverty significantly, whereby it has lifted 700 million Chinese out of poverty. By doing this, China has contributed 70 percent to the UN’s millennium development goal on poverty reduction, and created a miracle in the world’s development history. Some countries frequently advocate “freedom” and “democracy,” but China has been embarking on the path of poverty relief step by step. Apart from the accomplishments, the experience and knowledge in this area also constitute a huge source of soft power in ChinaAfrica cooperation.
The author is a senior research fellow at The Charhar Institute and a research fellow at the Institute of West Asian and African Studies, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. opinion@ globaltimes. com. cn