Beijing praises Xi for helping end extreme poverty
BEIJING — The ruling Communist Party is celebrating the official end of extreme poverty in China with a propaganda campaign that praises President Xi Jinping’s role, part of efforts to cement his image as a historymaking leader who is reclaiming his country’s rightful place as a global power.
The propaganda apparatus has been linking national successes to Xi, including fighting the coronavirus, China’s rise as a technology creator and December’s successful lunar mission to bring back moon rocks.
The party announced in November, with little fanfare, that China no longer had anyone in extreme poverty. That was down from an official estimate of almost 99 million living on annual incomes of less than $355 per person a decade ago. Average income per person among the “rural underprivileged” rose from $356 in 2015 to $1,665 last year, according to the official Xinhua News Agency.
The fullscale propaganda campaign launched this month has filled statecontrolled newspapers and airwaves with reports on the antipoverty milestone and Xi’s personal role in it.
They credit Xi with launching an initiative shortly after taking power in 2012 that enabled China to beat by a decade the 2030 target set by the World Bank for eliminating extreme poverty. A report by the party newspaper People’s Daily this week on the “historic leap” refers to Xi by his full name and title as party leader 121 times.
“General Secretary Xi Jinping has stood at the strategic height of building a welloff society in an allaround way and realizing the Chinese dream of the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation,” the newspaper said.
The event gives the ruling party a political trophy ahead of this year’s celebration of the 100th anniversary of its 1921 founding. It comes at a time when China’s economy is growing again following the coronavirus while the United States, Europe and other areas are still struggling with outbreaks.
The party said it reached the milestone despite having to take the unprecedented step of shutting down most of China’s economy in early 2020 to fight the coronavirus.
On Thursday, Xi cited antipoverty work as a sign of the effectiveness of the ruling party’s system.
“We have finished the arduous task of eradicating absolute poverty and created a miracle that shall go down in history,” Xi said at a ceremony honoring people who worked on the initiative.
He acknowledged the “material foundation” built up over four decades of marketstyle reforms that have transformed China into the world’s secondlargest economy and a middleincome society but mentioned no other officials or earlier leaders by name.
The event gives Xi, who has amassed more personal power than any leader since Mao Zedong, Communist China’s founder, a new opportunity to assert his historical importance.