By JOHN RICHARD SCHROCK
American news media often overlook or downplay any news of success in China. But mostly overlooked in the initial stages of the pandemic was a major economic achievement: China totally eliminated extreme poverty nationwide. This makes China exceptional in human history.
According to Reuters, China set the definition of “extreme poverty” at US$1.69 a day or earning less than US$620 a year based on exchange rates. Because the cost of living in rural China is less, this amount is lower than the World Bank threshold of US$1.90.
China’s economic miracle began after Mao’s death, with Deng Xiaoping ending the commune system—so individuals would benefit from their own efforts—and greatly expanding China’s educational system. This has now resulted in a middle class twice the size of America’s middle class, and still rapidly growing. In China there is an income disparity due to so many moving up to a higher standard of living. In America, our growing income disparity involves a shrinking middle class and a growing lower class.
2020 was the last year in their five year effort to end extreme poverty. In February of 2021, President Xi announced that the “arduous task of eradicating extreme poverty has been fulfilled.” He added: “According to the current criteria, all 98.99 million poor rural population have been taken out of poverty, and 832 poverty-stricken counties as well as 128,000 villages have been removed from the poverty list.”
The poorest regions of China are the rural mountainous regions including the provinces of Guizhou and Yunnan. When I spoke to about 200 graduating college seniors at Yunnan Normal University in 2007, I asked how many were from the countryside? About 50 raised their hands. I then asked how many attended the university on government scholarships that required they return and teach in the rural schools for ten years. Only five hands went up! When I asked the remaining rural students why they would not go back? They described the lack of electricity, the need to pump water, etc. in their poor rural schools isolated up valleys. It resembled our Depression-Ara Appalachia.
A decade later, mainly the elderly remained in those isolated villages. China’s five-year effort to eliminate extreme poverty involved the minimal social security, relocation to nearby towns (townification) providing basic apartments with plumbing and electricity, and the establishment of local industries, from mushroom farming to small industries in areas with adequate populations. The abandoned shacks in the mountains were demolished and the mountainsides reforested. For the sustained villages, there is a saying in Chinese: If you want to end poverty, build a road. This means that by providing access to the surrounding affluent population, a poor village can prosper.
“Sci-Tech commissioners” were agriculture specialists sent to the countryside to raise the standard of living for the younger farmers, introducing new crops such as winter potatoes, greenhousing, pigeon farms, etc. and this led nearly 100,000 villages out of poverty. Efforts to eradicate less severe poverty will continue, so this development effort will continue. Bloomberg reports that: “More than 850 million people have been lifted out of extreme penury in under four decades. Almost 90% of the population was below the international poverty threshold in 1981, according to the World Bank; by the 2019, that was under 1%. It’s true the world as a whole has seen a dramatic improvement in poverty rates, but more than three-quarters of that is due to China.”
Bloomberg continues: “A study by economist Thomas Piketty and others last year found that average incomes for that cohort [bottom half of incomes in China] multiplied by more than five times in real terms between 1978 and 2015, [compared] to a 1% drop for same group in the United States.”
So where does the U.S. stand on “extreme poverty”? In 2018, the U.N. published a report indicating 40 million Americans lived in poverty while 18.5 million lived in extreme poverty. U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley at that time called that an exaggeration. U.S. officials claimed that only 250,000 Americans lived in extreme poverty, a number widely seen as wishful thinking. But that would still be 250,000 more than in China. And China has 4.4 times our population!
But the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities calculates that about 18 percent of Americans still live in poverty, a rate higher than nearly all other developed nations.
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John Richard Schrock has trained biology teachers for more than 30 years in Kansas. He also has lectured at 27 universities during 20 trips to China. He holds the distinction of “Faculty Emeritus” at Emporia State University.