Don’t Use A Grenade To Blast A Flea: How China Eradicated Extreme Poverty
Tings Chak
On 25 February 2021, China announced that extreme poverty had been abolished for a country of 1.4 billion people. Over the last four decades, China lifted 850 million people out of poverty. In other words, China lifted nearly the entire population of Latin America and North Africa combined – contributing to 76% of the global reduction of poverty.
The PRC’s eradication of extreme poverty over the last seven decades is indeed a historic feat. This achievement is made all the more impressive as it comes during the time of a great global pandemic that has driven millions more into extreme poverty, especially in the Global South. This feat, therefore, is not only a victory by the Chinese people and government, but a historic achievement for peasants and workers beyond its borders. It is something that needs to be understood better by the popular movements and left forces of the world.
On 23 July 2021 – the centenary anniversary of the Communist Party of China’s (CPC) founding congress – Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research launched a study, Serve the People: The Eradication of Extreme Poverty in China. Based on academic literature and media, interviews with key experts, and field research in the southwestern province of Guizhou, this document highlights a few points to the success in China’s fight against poverty, particularly in this last phase of ‘targeted poverty alleviation’ (TPA) between 2013 and 2020.
Firstly, China relied on a multidimensional approach to poverty eradication, rather than cash-transfer or welfare-based schemes. Secondly, the campaign owed its strength to the Party-building efforts, particularly at the grassroots level in the countryside. Thirdly, the Chinese government demonstrated its capacity to mobilise the whole of society and its resources. Fourthly, the program centred the role of poor peasants in being lifted – and lifting themselves – out of poverty, and be protagonists in the process. Finally, the eliminating of extreme poverty is seen not as an end goal but as an important stage in the construction of socialism. Poverty, after all, is an issue of class struggle.
Don’t Use a Grenade to Blast a Flea
‘Poverty is not socialism, still less communism’, Deng Xiaoping famously said. He understood that during the reform and opening-up period, China needed to break its isolation from the world market and develop quickly its productive forces. As a result, the economic floor was lifted for hundreds of millions of China’s poor. However, the market and economic development could not resolve the issue of poverty. When Xi Jinping assumed presidency in 2013, TPA became the national program to reach the most difficult pockets of poverty. ‘Don’t use a grenade to blast a flea’, Xi said, recognising that to address poverty, the government needed to accurately locate each poor family and develop a plan for their emergence from poverty.
Over the course of this program, 1.6 trillion yuan (US$246 billion) was spent to build 1.1 million kilometres of rural roads, bring internet access to 98 percent of the country’s poor villages, renovate homes for 25.68 million people, and build new homes for 9.6 million others. By the end of 2020, the remaining 98.99 million people from 832 counties and 128,000 villages exited extreme poverty.
The program was guided by the core policy of: One income, two assurances, and three guarantees. China’s poverty line is set at US$2.3 per day (PPP-adjusted), which is higher than the World Bank standard of US$1.9 per day. In addition to income, the TPA relies on the ‘two assurances’ of food and clothing, and the ‘three guarantees’ of basic medical services, safe housing with electricity and drinking water, and compulsory public education. In China, free education is nine years, though it is extended in ethnic minority regions, such as Tibet, where it is 15 years. In other words, China took on a multidimensional approach to poverty, guided by a minimum income, while providing the essential elements of food, education, housing, and healthcare to the rural poor.
Move Amongst the People as a Fish Swims in the Sea
The CPC has 95.1 million members, with nearly five million organisations at every level of social life – if the Party was a country, it would be the 16th most populous in the world. That being said, the Party mobilisation of its cadres was essential in the fight against poverty. In 2014, 800,000 Party cadres were organised to knock on the door of millions of households in 128,000 villages across the country. Their task was to identify each household to be registered into the national program, based on income, education, housing, and healthcare conditions. A national database of 100 million individuals was created to assist in planning and implanting programs for each of them. The work of CPC’s cadres in the grassroots level hearkens to Mao Zedong, when he said that the People’s Liberation Army must ‘move amongst the people as a fish swims in a sea’.
Beyond identification, three million carefully selected cadres were sent to live in the countryside for years at a time, forming 255,000 teams that resided there – one team assigned to each village, one cadre for each family. Together with the villagers, a process of ‘democratic appraisal’ took place, in which community members debated and voted on the poverty situation of each family – who should be registered as poor, who had been lifted from poverty, and sometimes, who had fallen back into poverty. A high level of decentralisation, improvisation, and grassroots democracy in action took place. Alongside the local community, the cadres’ task was to see each family emerge from poverty. The conditions were tough, with 1,800 cadres losing their lives in the process. Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research spoke with one cadre assigned to Danyang village in Guizhou province.
‘I came to Danyang, whose Party organisation was considered ‘weak and loose’ and whose work had not been pushed hard enough’, Secretary Liu said, ‘which was why I was sent by the higher-level authorities to strengthen the building of the organisation’. For the three years that he had been living in the village, he rode his electric bike, visiting each of the five families he was responsible for – his phone was constantly buzzing. He helped organise agricultural cooperatives – grapefruit and hog production – to generate employment and income for the villager, and like the millions of cadres across the country, Liu attended to the daily material needs of the families. Mr. Zhang’s front door lock broke, Mrs. Wang’s son refuses to go to school, a neighbour’s aunt lost her job, or a sister’s husband drinks too much. Not surprisingly, due to the dual victories in containing Covid-19 and combatting extreme poverty, the CPC and the Chinese government have been experiencing broad and increasing popular support, with two recent studies by Harvard and York Universities placing approval rating at 93.1% and 98%, respectively. The fight against poverty can be seen as a reinsertion of the Party into the countryside, deepening connection and trust with the rural base, and strengthening grassroots democratic processes.
United Front Against Poverty
Beyond cultivating Party and public support, the poverty alleviation campaign mobilised broad sectors of society – a ‘united front’ against poverty. This involved public and private enterprises, civil society, social organisations, universities, and the military. East-West collaboration programs were developed to ensure that more industrialised eastern cities would provide financial investment for infrastructure and education, generate employment, and share essential technical and governmental experience with lesser-developed western regions. Programs such as Ten Thousand Enterprises Assisting Ten Thousand Villages were part of mobilising private enterprises while universities and colleges were partnered directly with registered poor villages in the program. In addition to this, national training programs were created for teachers and doctors, so that in exchange for free education, they would have to serve for some time in poor or ethnic minority villages.
The five core methods of addressing poverty included: developing industry; incentivising ecological compensation; guaranteeing free, quality, and compulsory education; relocation; and providing social assistance. The principal mechanism is developing industry, that is, developing productive capacity, specifically capital-intensive agricultural production (including crop processing and animal breeding). The second method was through ecological compensation, creating employment linked to the work of growing new forests, restoring farmlands, and reviving areas that have fallen prey to over-exploitation. Thirdly, improving education included building new facilities, training teachers, and providing huge incentives for students from peasant or poor families to go to university. As a result, from 2011 to 2018, 70% of first year students in Chinese universities were the first ever in their families to attend, and 70% of them were from peasant background. By 2020, China ranked first in the enrolment of women in tertiary education, according to the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report.
Less than 10% of the people who lifted themselves out of poverty did so through relocating to new areas. For those who live in extremely remote or disaster-prone areas, it is nearly impossible to break the cycle of poverty without relocating. One relocated resident, Mou’se, described his life in one of China’s ‘cliff villages’: ‘It took me half a day to climb down a cliff to buy a packet of salt’. China built new homes – free, furnished, and in a community with schools and health clinics – for 9.6 million people in the program, as a last resort measure. Finally, especially for those who are unable to work – people with disabilities and the elderly – the final method of poverty alleviation is through social assistance.
Horizons Ahead
Eradicating extreme poverty in China is indeed a significant achievement, though not an end-goal in itself. The country is now faced with urgent questions regarding inequality, unequal development, modernisation of the countryside, a rapidly aging society and diminishing labour force, and relative poverty as China prepares to enter a high-income society. Poverty, ultimately, is not a Chinese issue, but a global one that concerns all socialists, left movements, and progressive governments. What are some of the comparisons and lessons from the Chinese experience for other regions of the Global South? For example, Brazil’s Bolsa Familia program under Lula’s Workers Party made huge strides to addressing hunger through cash-transfers though could not address multidimensional poverty, or the Indian state of Kerala’s huge gains against poverty led by agrarian reform, improvements in public education and health, and welfare programs.
This study aims to bring forth some of the experiences and stories, both from those who were lifted – and lifted themselves – out of poverty and from those who helped do the lifting. It seeks to shine a light on some of the complexities, theories, and practices involved in this historic feat. Building a world in which poverty is eradicated is an essential part of constructing socialism. To be able to study, have a house, be well fed, and enjoy culture are aspirations shared by the working classes and poor across the world. It is part of the process of becoming human.
Tings Chak, researcher and coordinator of the Art Department of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, and a member of Dongsheng News. She was the lead author and researcher of Serve the People: The Eradication of Extreme Poverty in China.
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