Eliminating poverty with patience and hard work

BEIJING: President Xi Jinping has a history of working to alleviate poverty. He personally led a campaign to end poverty in Ningde Prefecture, southeastern China’s Fujian province, as early as 1988, and is now leading China toward a poverty-free future.

“The weak birds must start earlier than others,” Xi, then-secretary of Communist Party of China (CPC) Ningde Prefectural Committee, told local officials, according to the full text of his remarks at a symposium on poverty relief in north China’s Shanxi province on June 23, which was made public on Thursday.

Confident that “constant drops wear away a stone”, Xi led local people to work incessantly to alleviate poverty in the prefecture.

Some of Xi’s speeches in Ningde were later compiled into a book titled Up and Out of Poverty, which analysts said could serve as a general guide on China’s experience in poverty alleviation.

Ningde was not the only “weak bird” that strived to catch up with others.

At the end of 2016, more than 43 million people, or about 3% of China’s population, lived under the country’s poverty line of 2,300 yuan (RM1,495) of annual income in 2010 constant prices.

China’s top leadership remains aware of the arduous task they face.

Since becoming the general secretary of the CPC Central Committee in 2012, Xi has placed poverty alleviation on top of the CPC agenda and called it “the baseline task for building a moderately prosperous society”, which the country strives to achieve by 2020.

At the symposium in Shanxi, Xi sat down with CPC officials from the provincial to county levels, discussing ways they could help the “weakest birds” get a head start.

“Eradicating poverty has always been a tough battle, while eradicating poverty in extremely poor areas is the hardest fight of all,” Xi said.

Fortunately, China’s finest are taking the frontline in the fight to eradicate poverty.

By the end of 2016, about 775,000 officials had been sent to rural areas to design tailored poverty relief programmes for and with the local communities.

The banks followed. As of the end of 2016, outstanding loans from financial institutions for poverty alleviation totalled 2.5 trillion yuan (RM1.6 trillion), with 818.1 billion yuan (RM532bil) in new loans.

From 2013 to 2016, 55.64 million rural people, or more than 10 million each year, were lifted out of poverty in China.

Figures aside, benefits have been seen and not just in terms of money.

An example cited by Xi was a vil- lage in central China’s Hunan province, where men had difficulty finding wives because the poverty of the village was well-known.

Following improvements to the local economy, 20 single men were married and their wives joined them to begin a new life in the village.

To realise the ambitious goal of eradicating poverty by 2020, China still needs to lift over 10 million people out of poverty every year.

Creating jobs or offering training will not work so well for many who remain in poverty, particularly the old, sick and disabled.

In response, China has decided to take the time to work with the poor on a case-by-case basis. — Xinhua