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The Chinese Communist Party’s claim that extreme poverty has been eliminated has been challenged by a new study that argues that Beijing uses a limited and inflexible definition of poverty.
At the end of last year, the party announced that although the new crown virus pandemic caused negative economic growth in the first half of the year, it had successfully eliminated extreme poverty.
Reached the goal on time and delivered Propaganda strike On the eve of celebrating the centenary of the founding of the party in July this year, Chairman Xi Jinping.
Beijing also proposed methods worthy of research by developing countries, and released a white paper describing how China achieved the “ultimate victory” to eradicate poverty.
however, the study Bill Bikales, a former senior UN economist in China, issued a statement on Tuesday saying that China has not done enough to finally defeat poverty.
“China has not eradicated poverty — it has not even eradicated extreme poverty. And it will only do so until it has established a viable system that can identify poor people everywhere… Until the country provides a safety net for all of them [including] Those who have suffered death, serious illness, unemployment or other shocks,” he wrote in a report funded by the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation.
Bicales agreed that last year’s milestone was “undoubtedly an achievement of great historical significance” and all available evidence shows that China did what it intended to do.
But this success is still different from poverty eradication, because the static definition used by Beijing is inconsistent with the international reality of poverty, which is changing.
The Chinese government did not respond to a request for comment
In the April white paper, China described the targeted poverty alleviation system adopted by Xi Jinping as the “strongest weapon” for achieving “comprehensive victory” and “comprehensive eradication of extreme poverty”. [China’s] Thousands of years of history”.
China considers poverty to be a purely rural phenomenon, although more than 60% of its population Live in the city.
Launched in 2013, Xi Jinping’s election All the rural poor population-89.98 million in 2015-were identified and recorded in the national database. It then mobilized a large amount of the country’s resources to ensure that they were no longer below the poverty line by the end of 2020.
The rigid approach means that even if the coronavirus pandemic pushes Economic growth is in recession, China’s poverty alleviation work focuses on helping the remaining 5.51 million rural registered poor people on the original list. Few resources are used to alleviate the impact of disadvantaged families who are not originally registered as poor.
Bikales wrote: “To accurately capture the impact of Covid-19 on poverty in any place except the identified counties and villages, there needs to be no system in place at all.”
The debate about how to explain China’s poverty alleviation achievements also has an impact on the future of China’s social welfare programs.
Some economists believe that setting a higher absolute poverty threshold or using relative or multidimensional poverty measurement standards will benefit China, all of which require the first recognition that China still has poverty.
China’s poverty line is slightly higher than the global extreme poverty line of US$1.90 per day set by the World Bank, but lower than the US$5.50 per day recommended for upper-middle income countries.
“China is now an upper-middle-income country,” said Martin Reizer, director of the World Bank’s China Region. “This will be important… Poverty reduction efforts are increasingly turning to address the vulnerabilities faced by the large number of people still considered poor by middle-income country standards, including those living in urban areas.”
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