Looking beyond the 2020 goal

China has vowed to build a moderately well-off society by 2020, and as that year draws near, it is fair to say that goal has been largely accomplished in most parts of the country. But it is always the shortest board of a bucket that decides how much water it can hold. In this sense, the importance of the fourth session of the Central Financial and Economic Committee late last month — though less eyecatching than some larger scale ones — should not be underestimated. Presided over by President Xi Jinping and attended by top Party and government officials, the meeting not only highlighted the most prominent “short board” of China’s development today — by the end of last year there were still 16.6 million people living in abject poverty in rural areas — but also prescribed how to complete the last part of this long endeavor.

Given that more than 10 million people have been lifted out of poverty each year since 2012, it would seem that it should not be a problem to help the remaining impoverished population shake off poverty within the next two years. That might be the case based on the numbers alone, but the remaining impoverished households are scattered across remote mountain areas, and their poverty is caused by multiple factors, which means it requires not only more financial inputs but also more customized approaches to solve their problems.

For this reason, governments at various levels have been urged to properly handle three pairs of relations — that between the overall objective and the specific objective, that between absolute standards and comparative standards, and that between quantitative analysis and qualitative judgment. That may seem too abstract for people who are not familiar with Chinese politics and practical national conditions, but to the grassroots officials who are tasked with successfully carrying out the anti-poverty projects, this suggestion from the top leadership offers them plenty of food for thought, as they are directly related to their daily concerns, and the problems they face in their work.

For instance, some missing the bigger picture try to attend to big and small matters all at once; some blindly increase the input in some projects to increase the impoverished population’s incomes, ignoring the sustainability of these projects; some tend to make rash decisions or jump to conclusions without grasping the basic factual situations.

Urging those on the front line to consider these three pairs of relations and handle them in an appropriate way also looks beyond the year 2020, as these relations are related to the future struggle to realize the grander goal of China’s national rejuvenation by the middle of this century, when China is expected to become a modern socialist country. The strong signal the top leadership of the Party conveyed from this seemingly inconspicuous session was that it has already started engineering the governance methodology and philosophy for future decades.

— PEOPLE’S DAILY