Will China’s Huge Anti-Poverty Drive Make A Difference?

SCMP: Grinding poverty in China – is Xi Jinping’s alleviation campaign making any difference?

Families struggling to keep their heads above water in one mountain village say they’re counting on their children, not the government, to improve their lives.

In an impoverished mountain village in northern China, “Xiao Zhang” – or Little Zhang – is doing her homework.

There is just one stool to sit on and no table at her family’s run-down home, so the 15-year-old perches on a tree stump on the cold concrete floor, using the stool as a desk.

Little Zhang spends her weekends at home with her family, studying and helping her father to look after her mother and 18-year-old brother, both of whom have mental disabilities and cannot take care of themselves.

During the week she attends a boarding school in the township, with the help of a charity, working towards her goal of getting into university and eventually landing a job in a big city like Beijing.

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WNU Editor: On my first trip to China in the mid-1980s the first thing that struck me was the poverty .... and it was everywhere. In the first week one of my interpreters brought me to his university dorm room .... it was a 12x16 room that he shared with 3 other students. His only possessions were underwear, t-shirts, two pairs of pants, some shorts, sandals, a pair of shoes, and a few personal items. This extreme poverty is what drove the student protest movement in the late 1980s that eventually led to the Tiananmen massacre in June of 1989. Fortunately ... the times have changed. Today .... China is a different country. Hundreds of millions have benefitted from the economic boom .... specifically the eastern part of the country. But for the rest .... they are still far behind. If Chinese President Xi succeeds in bringing the rest of the country to some level of a middle class .... he will be revered by the hundreds of millions who still live in poverty. If he does not .... history will not be kind to him.