Victory over poverty draws praise
Scholars say China’s strategies, starting with basic needs, offer valuable lessons
When Ritu Agarwal visited villages in Central China’s Henan province in 1997 as a research scholar from New Delhi, she found people living in “almost backward” conditions and mired in poverty.
The rural communities were suffering due to constant flooding from the Yellow River. People lived in poorly built houses, with no electricity or clean water. The soil was poor, farming was limited to grain cultivation, and there were not many opportunities for occupations other than farming.
Most of the children would not have dreamed of gaining higher education to improve the living standards of their families.
To Agarwal, it seemed that an improvement in the people’s lives would have been all but impossible.
Fast-forward to the next decade, when the Indian scholar witnessed something of a miracle with the huge transformation evident when she visited rural China in 2015 and 2017.
Agarwal noticed prosperity in the villages as they were connected with roads and highways. Families were living in brick homes with electricity and access to clean water.
In addition, nearly every child attended elementary school, said Agarwal, who is now an associate professor at the Centre for East Asian Studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi.
Such villages are among the many successes achieved by China’s policies to eradicate abject poverty. China announced in late 2020 that it had removed the last remaining counties from a list of poor regions, in the southwestern province of Guizhou, and achieved the goal of eliminating extreme poverty.
President Xi Jinping declared on Feb 25 last year that China had scored a “complete victory” in its fight against poverty by lifting all 98.9 million poverty-stricken people out of penury since the country started a new round of its anti-poverty drive in late 2012.
Altogether, more than 770 million Chinese have been lifted from absolute poverty in the past four decades. China’s success in eliminating absolute poverty since the start of the nation’s economic reforms is a “great story in human history”, the World Bank has acknowledged.
Indian experts note that China has adopted a variety of reforms and poverty alleviation strategies in different periods, and the overall strategy was to promote broad-based economic development. Much of the focus has been on the poorest rural areas, the experts said.
“The government directed resources to human development, especially to education, healthcare and decent nutrition. Later, it focused attention on the lagging regions and rolled out special measures to address the issue,” said economist R.Ramakumar, of the Tata Institute of Social Sciences in Mumbai.
China poured almost $700 billion in loans and grants into poverty alleviation between 2015 and 2020 — about 1 percent of each year’s economic output, excluding large donations by State-owned enterprises, according to government data.
The government provided free elementary education for all children, financed road construction to strengthen rural connectivity, and also spent a lot on projects to bring electricity and clean water to rural areas, the Indian experts noted.
There was determination among officials at local levels to bring new businesses, new jobs and new infrastructure to the targeted lagging regions according to their specific conditions, said B.R. Deepak, a professor at Jawaharlal Nehru University’s Centre for Chinese and Southeast Asian Studies.
Avijit Banerjee, a professor in the department of Chinese language and culture at Visva-Bharati University in West Bengal, said that relocating millions of people from remote villages to apartment complexes has been one of the important tasks carried out by government officials to eradicate poverty.
Sometimes these structures were built in towns and cities, but in some places new villages were built near the old ones, Banerjee said.
China completed the construction of more than 2.66 million homes to resettle 9.6 million impoverished people during the period of the 13th Five-Year Plan (2016-20), according to the National Development and Reform Commission, the nation’s top economic planning agency.
Beijing’s success in eradicating extreme poverty stems from three factors — the Communist Party of China’s leadership, its commitment and its mobilization, said Nilotpal Basu, a former member of the Indian Parliament and a member of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of India (Marxist).
China’s poverty alleviation efforts provide valuable lessons for developing countries, Basu added.