Nasim Mahmmud :
On July 1, 2021 marked the 100th anniversary of the Communist Party of China (CPC). Grand celebrations were held nationwide. Under its leadership, China has achieved spectacular development and succeeded in eradicating extreme poverty all over the country. Chinese President Xi Jinping formally declared complete victory in alleviating absolute poverty in the country during a conference in Beijing on 25 February 2021. The announcement of this great miracle in the human history of poverty alleviation came four months before the centenary of the founding of the CPC which leads the world’s most populous nation. Over the past century, the CPC has united and led the Chinese people in the battle against poverty with unwavering faith and will. The CPC leadership made historic achievements in wiping out absolute poverty facing the Chinese nation for thousands of years. No country has been able to lift hundreds of millions of people out of poverty in such a short time. This is one of the greatest world stories of the 21st century.
Moreover, China has already achieved its first centennial development goal- building a moderately prosperous society in all respects and is marching in confident strides toward the second centennial goal of building the nation into a great modern socialist country. And the country meets its poverty alleviation targets under the United Nations 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development 10 years ahead of schedule. Eliminating poverty in a country with a population of 1.4 billion may sound too ambitious as a mission of impossible for some western critics. But it is a mission that must be accomplished for China because achieving mutual prosperity is a goal of socialism. The CPC has achieved such commendable achievements without following the western path.
Chinese poverty alleviation is a political economy theory of distribution conducive to both poverty reduction and development. Its core principle is to maintain the goal of national common prosperity and relies on precise means to build a ‘pro-poor market’ in which the government, market and society jointly work to emancipate the productivity of the poor and make them contributors to growth. The result is a more balanced and fairer development by turning the recipients of targeted poverty alleviation into productive members of society.
The key to effective poverty alleviation lies in identifying the real poor people. The strategy of targeted poverty alleviation is a magic weapon for China to win the battle. China has identified every poor individual in every village and a personal file is created in the national poverty alleviation information system. The Chinese government has established a poverty eradication management network with the central government acting as the coordinator, provincial governments taking overall responsibility, and municipal and county governments overseeing implementation. China has been applying 10 poverty models to alleviate rural poverty since reform and opening-up started in 1978. The models are poverty alleviation through financial aid, micro-finance, industrial development, relief for work, education, science and technology, relocation, village-wise advancement, mobilize the social forces and, systematization of individual’s positive factors.
The political will of the ruling CPC has played an important role, which put the fight against poverty and China’s rural revitalization high on the agenda of the leadership. From 1978 to 2020, China’s GDP rapidly increased from 367.9 billion Yuan ($ 56.67 billion) to 101.6 trillion Yuan ($ 15.7 trillion), upgrading the country from a low income to a middle-income one. The per capita disposable income of the rural poor people increased from RMB 6079 in 2013 to RMB 12,588 in 2020, up by 11.6% per annum on average. By the end of 2020 impoverished areas had gained 1.1 million kilometers of reconstructed highways and 35000 kilometers of new railways, and over 98% of poor villages had access to Optical Fibre Communications (OFC) and 4G mobile network. A total of 10.21 million unprivileged women had received skills training, and 11.2 million children had benefited from nutritional improvement projects for unprivileged areas.
All the 200,000 dropouts from the compulsory education coming from poor families have returned to school. More than 8 million middle and high school graduates from poor families have received vocational training and 5.4 million poor students have received higher education. Moreover, a social welfare system for the poor population of advanced age, incapable seniors and the disabled person had been fully established, benefiting 36.89 million seniors and over 24 million disabled people. The number of e-businesses in all 832 poor counties grew from 1.32 million in 2016 to 3.11 million in 2020. E-commerce has helped 500,000 poor people increase their income, and their per capita income derived from this sector rose from 430 Yuan in 2015 to 930 Yuan in 2020.
