#BTColumn – Building a world free from poverty

by Yan Xiusheng

At a grand gathering held on February 25, 2021 marking China’s achievements in poverty alleviation and honouring its model fighters against poverty, H.E. Xi Jinping, President of the People’s Republic of China solemnly declared that China has completed the arduous task of eliminating extreme poverty. China has completed eradication of extreme poverty – the first target of the United Nations 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development – 10 years ahead of schedule.

Poverty is a chronic affliction of human society and a common challenge faced by the whole world. Poverty and its associated problems, including hunger, diseases, and social conflicts, are serious impediments to people’s pursuit
of a better life, so the eradication of poverty has always been a wish to be fulfilled.

China is the world’s largest developing country, with a population of 1.4 billion. In addition to its weak foundations and uneven development, the nation had long been plagued by poverty at a scale and a level of severity that has rarely been seen anywhere else in the world.

Over the past 100 years, the Communist Party of China (CPC) has united and led the Chinese people in the battle against poverty with unwavering faith and will.

Especially since the 18th CPC National Congress in 2012, the Party Central Committee, with General Secretary Xi Jinping at the core, has fought a decisive battle against poverty that is unprecedented in scale and intensity. I would like to use a set of data to illustrate this great and arduous journey.

• During the past eight years, the 98.99 million people in rural areas who were living below the current poverty threshold all shook off poverty; all the 128,000 impoverished villages and 832 designated poor counties got rid of poverty.

• The per capita disposable income of the rural poor increased from RMB6,079 in 2013 to RMB12,588 in 2020, up by 11.6 per cent per annum on average.

• There are no dropouts from schools in the countryside due to financial difficulties; nine-year compulsory education is now available to all children from rural poor households, and the completion rate in 2020 was 94.8 per cent.

• Basic medical insurance coverage of the poor is over 99.9 per cent. Some 19.36 million impoverished people have been covered by rural subsistence allowances or extreme poverty relief funds, and 60.98 million by basic pension schemes for rural and non-working urban residents, achieving nearly 100 per cent coverage.

• Impoverished areas had gained 1.1 million km of reconstructed highways and 35,000 km of new railways. Over 98 per cent of poor villages have access to optical fiber communications and 4G technology.

• 99.48 per cent of villages in 22 provinces and equivalent administrative units in central and western China had seen their own cultural centers completed.

• A total of 10.21 million impoverished women have received skills training, over five million of whom have increased their incomes through activities such as handicrafts, crop and animal husbandry, housekeeping and e-business. Small-sum guaranteed loans and micro credit amounting to more than RMB450 billion have been provided to impoverished women.

• More than seven million poor people with disabilities have been lifted out of poverty as scheduled. The systems for providing living allowances for poor people with disabilities and nursing subsidies for severely disabled persons cover more than 24 million.

Eliminating poverty is a challenge for all countries. Each subject to different national conditions and at different stages of development, countries adopt different poverty reduction criteria, methods and approaches.

Bearing in mind its prevailing reality and understanding the nature of poverty in its domain, China has embarked on a path of poverty alleviation, with upholding the CPC leadership, and has accumulated several experiences, including people-centered philosophy, highlighting poverty alleviation in the governance, eradicating poverty through development, pressing ahead with poverty alleviation based on reality, letting the poor play the principal role and pooling all resources to create synergy.

China’s approach may provide experience and options for other countries which want to speed up development and lift the living quality of their people.

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres recently extended congratulations to President Xi on the occasion of the announcement of China’s successful efforts in the fight against extreme poverty. ‘This extraordinary result is a reason for hope and inspiration to the entire community of nations,’ the UN chief said.

While advancing poverty alleviation at home, China has always provided assistance to other developing countries to the best of its capacity. For example, we set up the China-UN Peace and Development Fund and the South-South Cooperation Assistance Fund, and helped establish agricultural technology demonstration centers in Africa, benefiting local people.

At the same time, China has continued to seek greater synergy between the Belt-and-Road Initiative (BRI) and the 2030 Agenda.

According to a World Bank report, BRI cooperation has the potential to lift 7.6 million people out of extreme poverty and 32 million out of moderate poverty.

As one of the countries that signed MOU on BRI Cooperation with China, Barbados remains China’s long-standing and true friend. China will continue to facilitate assistance to our friends, Barbados included, to together overcome challenges in their social and economic development, either providing vaccines and other PPEs during the COVID-19 pandemic period, or strengthening pragmatic cooperation in the post COVID-19 era, as its capacity allows.

With that, China and Barbados can march forward hand in hand along their ways to enable their peoples to live a prosperous life at an early date, which will jointly make due contribution to the cause of poverty alleviation for mankind, and ‘build a global community of shared future free from poverty’, as proposed by H.E. President Xi Jinping at the 2015 Global Poverty Reduction and Development Forum!

Yan Xiusheng is Ambassador of the People’s Republic of China to Barbados.