[ad_1]
The rush to the cities has left rural communities with dwindling populations and fewer job opportunities. Faced with this decline, Xi’s poverty alleviation policies have focused on the countryside.
In its announcement, Xinhua quoted an expert as saying that this marked the end of “the age-old issue of extreme poverty.”
But despite what appears to be a major achievement, there seems to be some confusion in state media and among experts about whether this means the end of poverty in China.
Speaking at his daily press conference on Tuesday, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said China had “completed the goal of achieving comprehensive poverty alleviation by the end of 2020.” “The hard-earned results are gratifying,” he said.
But others have been more cautious. The state tabloid Global Times quoted experts as saying the Chinese government needed to “thoroughly review” the results of poverty alleviation and that it would announce a likely outcome in the first half of 2021.
According to Xinhua, Xia said that “random inspections” and “censuses” would be needed first and then, once all the standards have been met, it will be up to the Central Committee of the Communist Party to announce that “the battle against poverty is over.” won “.
A national division
Whether or not the goal was officially met, experts said there was little doubt that the Chinese government would announce within months that it had met its goal of ending absolute poverty by the end of 2020.
While poverty experts around the world have praised China’s work in helping to end deprivation in the country, there has also been criticism of both Beijing’s goals and its methods of achieving them.
The division is not just between rural and urban centers, but even between cities themselves. While large population centers such as Beijing and Shanghai, mainly on the east coast, have seen rapid increases in wealth and living standards, many second- and third-tier cities are lagging behind.
Experts are also divided on the success of individual measures to combat poverty on the ground in poor areas of China.
Matteo Marchisio, country director for China at the United Nations International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), said that in his time working on the ground in impoverished communities he had seen government agencies installing new roads and infrastructure to provide electricity and electricity to rural villages. clean water.
Given the large size of China, many rural communities have been cut off from basic services and transport links for decades, even as much of the country has rapidly modernized.
“There may be doubts about whether the poverty line was too low or not … (but) I think that for the rest of the world the key message is that it is possible to end poverty, lift people out of poverty,” Marchisio said. . “It really is a message of hope.”
“I was in poor villages at the end of 2019 and what I saw was … some things that were going very well and other things that were total disasters, that were worse than nothing,” said John Donaldson, poverty expert and associate professor at the University. of Management of Singapore.
Has poverty alleviation been completed?
With so much time and money invested in the poverty alleviation campaign, not to mention Xi’s personal political capital, experts said a delayed announcement likely indicated that Beijing wanted to make sure everything was okay before going public.
With the silence of the top leaders of the Communist Party and the silent response in the People’s Daily, the Party’s spokesman, it appears that other state media have simply gotten ahead.
But despite the confusion in the state media, it appears that it is only a matter of time before it is announced that poverty alleviation has been successful.
Marchisio said he had heard of official missions going to the field to “validate the statements of local governments”, and hoped Beijing was waiting to see their reports before saying that poverty alleviation was a success.
But Xi and his government have not described exactly how they intend to maintain momentum after the end of the poverty alleviation campaign or build on the successes so far.
Marchisio said that Beijing must first ensure that its successes in poverty alleviation can be sustained once the Chinese government stops investing huge sums of public money in rural areas.
He said that there are still hundreds of millions of people in China who are at risk of falling back into absolute poverty. “What has been achieved is just one step in a much longer development process and the journey is far from over,” he said.
Poverty expert Donaldson said he hoped the Chinese government would now raise the poverty line further and announce its goal of further increasing the livelihoods of its people, but the political message of an “end to poverty” had complicated it.
“I think the unfortunate thing about this is that in many ways it distracts from China’s real achievements,” he said.
“People are looking at the target and the deadline and asking if it will be eliminated and the answer is almost certainly not. But will all of that distract from the real achievements of what China has done?”
