Why We Still Need to Fight Poverty in China
No other nation in history has achieved the kind of poverty alleviation success that China has. Over the past 30 years the country has lifted more than 600 million people out of poverty. China’s annual per capita income increased from $200 in 1990 to $5,000 in 2010 and more than three-quarters of global poverty reduction achieved between 1990 and 2005 was down to the Chinese. And yet, in spite of this unprecedented progress, there are still areas of China that remain stubbornly, unimaginably poor.
The key characteristic that these areas all share is that they are rural. Data from the China Household Income Project shows that China has succeeded in eradicating urban poverty almost entirely, largely thanks to a government subsidy that brings the annual incomes of city dwellers up to a minimum level of 4,476 yuan ($700). But rural regions, particularly in the west of the country, continue to suffer from crushing poverty and haven’t benefited from China’s economic success.
The powerhouse of China’s remarkable economic development over the past three decades has been the east coast regions, particularly the ‘special economic zones’, where tax and business incentives were used to attract foreign investment and technology. But the economic take-off in the east soon left China’s central and western provinces behind. As a result, over the last 30 years 270 million people have been drawn from rural areas, with few opportunities, to China’s booming east coast regions by the promise of plentiful work and the chance of prosperity.
Life is hard for these migrant workers, far from home and often living and working in very poor conditions, but it can be much harder for those left behind. For many migrants, the only time in the year when they have the opportunity to go home is during Spring Festival, when a billion people struggle home during the largest annual human migration on earth, known in China as the ‘Spring Rush’. Among them are millions of parents, who felt compelled to migrate to the other side of the country in order to provide for their families, leaving behind millions of children, either in the care of other relatives or, far worse, to fend entirely for themselves. Tragically, there are 61 million of these “left behind” children.
In the vast majority of cases, their parents leave for the sake of their children — there’s no way they could afford to provide them with an education or adequate housing or clothing if they stayed — but the children are left to bear the emotional and physical costs of separation. Often they will see their parents just once a year, and they are hugely vulnerable to a range of risks and dangers: their care givers may be neglectful or incapable of looking after children; they face the risk of labor exploitation, abuse and violence; they are more likely to get into crime; and rates of injury and accidental death are higher among left-behind children than among their peers. The most devastating part of this tale is that of the children left to fend for themselves.
There are around two million of them, struggling to scratch out an existence without any adult support. Over the past years, China has had to face harrowing cases of children committing suicide because they felt they couldn’t go on. In June of last year, a fourteen-year-old boy in Guizhou province, southwest China, left a note thanking his parents, before drinking from a bottle of pesticide and passing it onto his three sisters, aged five, eight and nine, who did the same. Three years earlier, in the same town, five abandoned children died of carbon-monoxide poisoning after sheltering in a roadside dumpster and lighting charcoal for warmth.
Those who go with their parents often don’t fare much better. The reason why so many parents don’t take their children with them is China’s household registration (hukou) system; because they are not from that area originally, migrant children taken to the more prosperous regions of China remain unregistered and therefore unable to access essential health, education or social services.
With China’s economic slowdown and its transition to a consumption-led economy, the tide of labor migration is slowing, and some migrant workers are moving closer to home as the government works to create inland jobs. But there is still a very long way for the government to go in order to tackle China’s remaining poverty head-on. The 12th Five Year Plan, which came to an end in 2016, aimed to eradicate all poverty by 2020, and the 13th Five Year Plan, due to be finalized in March, is likely to stick to that goal, advocating increased investment from central and provincial governments to integrate channels for poverty alleviation.
In fact, poverty alleviation has been named as the number one priority for the government over the next few years. And thanks to the way in which the Chinese government works, almost all of the Gates Foundation’s partners in China have poverty alleviation within their KPI now. The Ministry of Commerce, for example, has 4 counties that it needs to support; many universities are required to provide courses for officials from poor counties; all state-owned companies have a “poverty alleviation agenda”; and even private companies like BGI are responding by providing services that benefit rural populations. The kind of poverty that remains in China won’t simply be solved by the economic development that has succeeded in pulling most of the rest of the country into middle-income status. The aim now is to take on this challenge and change the lives of the millions who have fallen through the gaps in China’s development success.
Philip Nelson contributed to this article.
