The new study calls into question China’s presumption to eradicate poverty

The Chinese Communist Party’s claim that it had eliminated extreme poverty has been challenged by a new study that argues that Beijing used a limited and inflexible definition of what it means to be poor.

Late last year, the party announced that extreme poverty had been successfully eradicated, despite negative economic growth during the first half of the year caused by the coronavirus pandemic.

Achieve the goal according to the schedule delivered in propaganda coup by President Xi Jinping ahead of the party’s centennial celebrations in July this year.

Beijing has also offered its approach as worthy of study to the developing world and has published a white paper describing how China achieved its “final victory” against poverty.

Despite this, research published Tuesday by Bill Bikales, a former senior UN economist in China, said China has not done enough to win the final victory over poverty.

“China has not eradicated poverty, not even extreme poverty. And it won’t until it has viable systems that identify poor people everywhere. . . and until the country provides a safety net for all its people [including] those suffering a death, serious illness, loss of employment or other shock, “he wrote in the report, funded by the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation.

Bikales agreed that last year’s milestone was “unquestionably a success of great historical significance” and that all available evidence suggests that China did what it set out to do.

But this success is still different from having eradicated poverty, because Beijing’s static definitions disagreed with the changing international realities of poverty.

The Chinese government did not respond to any requests for comment

In the April White Paper, China described the target system adopted under Xi as “the strongest weapon” to achieve “complete victory” and “eliminate global and extreme poverty for the first time in [China’s] history of thousands of years ”.

China considers poverty to be a purely rural phenomenon, even though more than 60% of its population lives in urban areas.

Launched in 2013, Xi’s campaign identified all rural poor (89.98 million in 2015) and recorded them in a national database. He then mobilized large state resources to ensure that they were no longer below the poverty line by the end of 2020.

The rigid approach meant that even when the coronavirus pandemic pushed declining economic growth, work against poverty in China focused on helping the remaining 5.51 million rural poor registered on the original list. Few resources were directed at mitigating the clash of vulnerable households that were not originally among the registered poor.

“To accurately capture the impact of Covid-19 on poverty anywhere other than in the already identified counties and villages, systems that were simply not in place would have been needed,” Bikales wrote.

The debate over how to interpret China’s poverty achievements also has ramifications for the future of the country’s social welfare programs.

Some economists have argued that the country would benefit if a much higher absolute poverty line is set or if a relative or multidimensional measure of poverty is used, which would require first acknowledging that poverty still exists in China.

China’s poverty line is just above the World Bank’s global extreme poverty line of $ 1.90 a day, but below the $ 5.50 recommended for middle- and high-income countries.

“China is now a middle-income country,” said Martin Raiser, country director of the World Bank of China. “It simply came to our notice then. . . that poverty reduction efforts are increasingly shifting to address the vulnerabilities faced by the large number of people who still consider themselves poor by the standards of middle-income countries, including those living in urban areas. “