Xi claims to have eradicated extreme poverty in China
CHINA’S president yesterday said his country had achieved the “human miracle” of eliminating extreme poverty in the world’s most populous nation, during a ceremony to put his personal stamp on the victory.
Xi Jinping delivered an hour-long speech on the milestone, in what was seen as an attempt to claim credit and consolidate power before his second term ends.
He claimed 10million people had been lifted out of poverty each year of his eight in power at a cost of almost £176 billion.
The ceremony highlighted his personal role, including work earlier in his career reducing poverty in a town in the north-west.
“I insisted on looking at real poverty, understanding the real efforts to reduce poverty, helping those who are in real poverty and achieving real poverty alleviation,” he said on state television.
Prof Carl Minzner, of Fordham Law School, who specialises in Chinese law and governance, said the ceremony and propaganda were “aimed at painting Xi Jinping as the victorious commander leading China to success in its millennia-long battle against poverty and allowing him to claim personal credit for this accomplishment.”
“This will have dramatic ramifications in terms of Xi’s personal power, the extent to which a cult of personality surrounding Xi will be tacitly or directly encouraged,” he said.
Mr Xi has amassed more personal power than any leader since communist
China’s founder, Mao Tse-tung, and the poverty milestone has given him a fresh chance to assert his historical importance.
China has been awash with propaganda recently, declaring that poverty has been eradicated in the nation of 1.4billion people. The government has managed to pull hundreds of millions of people out of poverty since it turned to market reforms in the 1970s and many live consumer lifestyles that earlier generations could not have imagined.
Yet claims of an end to poverty have been met with international scepticism as scores of millions still struggle to make ends meet. Some policy experts have said the country’s definition of poverty hid how many people were still struggling.
China defines extreme rural poverty as annual per capita income of 4,000 yuan (£442). The World Bank’s global threshold is $1.90 a day but 4,000 yuan works out at roughly $1.70 a day.
Experts, however, have long suggested that the world’s second-largest economy should use a more relative poverty line to gauge its population’s economic health.
The World Bank estimates about 373million Chinese live on less than $5.50 a day. Per capita income is only about a quarter of that of high-income countries and inequality between towns and rural areas remains.
It is also unclear how sustainable the achievement will be, as many have been paid government stipends. It is unclear how long such payments will continue. China’s state pension fund is already slated to run dry by 2035.