Poverty in China

danmanjones's picture

The Chinese villagers who fear they can never escape the poverty trap

In 2015, China launched a wide-ranging campaign meant to wipe out poverty across China in just five years. The programme was meant to lift the entire population above the poverty line, ensuring every family would have an annual income above 2,300 yuan (US$340) by 2020. 

 

The national campaign has made some headway, with official statistics showing the number of rural poor has dropped from 82.39 million in 2012 to 16.6 million at the end of 2018, and another 10 million population on target to escape the poverty level in 2019.

 

But people of one village in Hebei province are among those waiting for poverty alleviation efforts to reach them. Xiaoguancheng had been earmarked to receive government support as part of the government campaign. 

 

The South China Morning Post first visited the village in 2018, and when we returned a year later, we found little had changed and for some families, conditions had grown even worse.  

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Woodsman's picture

puts our issues into perspective.

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bronobo's picture

feel bad for the people in the vid, but would be nice to have stats to see measures on how successful the plan was. the % of people who made it above the goal, and stayed there through the end of the program. maybe compare it to similar plans in other countries. just seen a bunch of vids about huge homeless problems on west coast cities like Seattle, SF, and LA. i think the wealth gap is more dramatic in China because it was such a sudden change from like 40-50 years of communism to pretty quick change to some hybrid of state controlled capitalism.

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sato's picture

i've read reports that say a very large number of people who've "escaped" poverty have been moved out of dying rural areas and into government-built towns, but these places have no economy so they're all completely reliant on government handouts of food. if it ever ends, they'll starve.

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danmanjones's picture

According to the World Bank, more than 500 million people were lifted out of extreme poverty as China's poverty rate fell from 88 percent in 1981 to 6.5 percent in 2012, as measured by the percentage of people living on the equivalent of US$1.90 or less per day in 2011 purchasing price parity terms.

Yeah their wealth gap has been increasing but they're suppress it since Xi Jinping came into power. They're cracking down on corruption & trying to build up a healthy middle class with high tech jobs etc. They still have a long way to go but their plan is to have a proper socialised system by 2050.

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Lambus's picture

Being born into poverty, it is extremely difficult to escape.

 

I would have become a Cannabis farmer and distributed the product to tourists visiting Beijing.

 

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