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China’s Number One Beggar Village
ChinaHush has translated an article from China Youth Daily about China’s infamous “beggar village” and includes photos from Netease which show propaganda slogans throughout the village urging residents to live with dignity:
Xiaozhai Village in Min County, Gansu Province is well-known throughout the country because media call it “China’s number one beggar village”. According to the numerous media coverage over the years, most of the farmers in this village are like migratory birds, migrating and begging through the developed coastal cities like Jinan, Qingdao, Shenyang, Nanjing etc. “going north in the summer and south in the winter”. Today this village strives to change its embarrassing image; among the 12 communities in Xiaozhai village, only two of them are still living with the old ways. However the bad reputation does not just go away in one day. Xiaozhai village has a long way to go to in order to clear its bad name. Recently China Youth Daily reporter visited the village to see how much it has changed; and whether this infamous village still carries on its humiliating tradition.
December 26, 2009, on the entrance of the village, a slogan printed on the wall “Stand up and live with dignity!”
“Stop kneeling! stand up!”
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- January 12, 2010 11:30 AM
Hu Xingdou: China’s Poor: Always with Us?
On Open Democracy, Hu Xingdou, professor of economics at the Beijing Institute of Technology, writes about the reasons why it is difficult to break out of the cycle of poverty in China:
In China, the cycle of poverty is due to the failings and irrationalities of a number of systems – of household registration, education, state-owned monopolies, taxation, distribution of resources, welfare, the press, public representation and government bureaucracy.
[...] China’s welfare system works on three levels, or classes. Cadres and civil servants enjoy the best treatment. Next are urban residents and company employees, many of whom face issues with unemployment or healthcare provision. The third class is rural residents, with medical care and pension provision only just getting started and currently at a very low level. Generational poverty will, I fear, just carry on.
But these are just the secondary causes of second-generation poverty. The most fundamental cause is that vulnerable groups lack the right to speak, to organize and to exercise oversight of government. We lack private publications – local officials control radio, TV and the new media to protect and add to their own interests. The voices of the poor, petitioners, the workers and the rural are not heard. Workers and rural residents lack a truly representative organization. They are therefore unable to negotiate on a level playing field with capital, and so wages and benefits stay low. There are severe restrictions on what farmers can do to market their products, so rural incomes remain low and quality and safety remain in question. Meanwhile, people’s representatives and officials who have not been appointed through genuine elections will not of their own accord represent the people’s interests. And so poverty will be passed on again and again through a vast and vulnerable population.
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- October 21, 2009 8:13 PM
China Police Rescue Trafficked Children
As part of a national crackdown on child trafficking, police have rescued 23 children and made several arrests. From Reuters:
The Wuhan Rail Bureau in central China has also netted 18 suspects in an 8-day campaign targeting trains pulling in from the city of Kunming, the capital of impoverished Yunnan province in southeast China, the Xinhua news agency said.
Other children, ranging in age from 100 days to 8 years, from the poor, coal-mining province of Shanxi, have been found in Shandong province on the prosperous coast. They were taken hundreds of miles in buses by smuggling rings that used poor migrants to accompany the children.
Many are now in orphanages, since their parents have not been found, Central China Television said in a report on the campaign.
Chinese babies, especially boys, from poor and remote areas may be sold to more prosperous people in far-away provinces. Some older children are also sold to gangs who train them to beg in bigger, richer cities.
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- June 21, 2009 9:37 AM
Slideshow: Road to School
A blogger “Flying Bird and Fish” posted a series of photos he took in a mountain area showing some rural children walking to school in a dangerous cliff road. He says that he was scared to see the scene. His hands were sweating and his legs were even trembling while taking photos of the children, via blog.sina.com.cn:
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- March 1, 2009 7:26 PM
China Raises Poverty Standards, 28 Mln Rural Residents To Benefit
From Xinhua:
The Chinese government said Saturday it would expand coverage of its anti-poverty program in rural areas next year to include an additional 28.41 million residents.
Fan Xiaojian, director of the Office for Poverty Alleviation and Development under the State Council, said rural residents with an annual per capita income of less than 1067 yuan (156 U.S. dollars) would begin to be covered in the country’s poverty-relief program next year.
Currently, the program only benefited rural residents with an annual per capita income of less than 786 yuan.
China defined an annual income of less than 786 yuan as absolute poverty and an annual income of between 786 and 1067 yuan as low income.
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- December 28, 2008 6:39 AM
CCTV Investigates Peasant Girl’s BBS Forum Post
In early September, CCTV reported on a bitter Sina.com BBS post by a peasant girl working in Shanghai. On Saturday the state news channel tracked down and interviewed Little Yang, who wrote the post titled ‘Late 70s Peasant Girl’s hopeless survival, would rather be a mistress than marry a poor person’ (Chinese).
See the CCTV interview on Sina.com
ChinaSMACK blog has an English transcript of the interview, as well as translations of comments on Sina.com (Chinese):
What reasons made Peasant Girl post her article? What was her intention? Where is she now? Why did she write such an article? Are there hidden stories behind her story? This reporter contacted the Peasant Girl several times and asked to see her but was refused. After much correspondence, she agreed be interviewed.
Little Yang [...] said that everything that happened was caused by an accident several days ago. That day, she went out to look for a job but wasn’t feeling well. She fainted on the street and was taken to the hospital. When she woke up, she was shocked by the 1300元 bill. The high medical expenses caused Little Yang to become penniless — she had just lost her job before all this had happened.
The interview pays special attention to reactions from netizens who read Yang’s post:
It was a moment of impulse, to let out her frustration and disappointment, but after the article was posted Little Yang was confronted with the impact of her words. She also felt the power of the internet.
[...]After the incident, Little Yang was feeling deserted, betrayed by her friends and relatives. A friend of Little Yang’s, an ordinary working girl, broke off any relations with Little Yang after Little Yang posted her article on the BBS.
She was very frustrated, but there were some things that made Little Yang feel comforted.
A young man called Little Bao, an enthusiastic netizen, was very sympathetic towards Little Yang and her plight. He decided to help Little Yang in any way he could. Faced with Little Bao’s good intentions, Little Yang did not initially accept his help. She felt that they were very similar, both of them had come to Shanghai to work and their income wasn’t very high, she could not bring herself to spend his money. However, because her eye problem was getting worse, and yesterday she finally agreed to accept Little Bao’s help. Little Yang stressed that money for her treatment will definitely be repaid to Little Bao in the future.
Read ChinaSMACK’s English translations of Yang’s post and netizens’ reactions to it here.
Read more about migrant workers here on CDT.
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- October 27, 2008 11:27 PM
The Olympics Party Is Over. Now China Has To Clean Up
Isabel Hilton, editor of chinadialogue.net, writes in the Guardian that after the euphoria of the recent Beijing Olympics wears off, China is going to have to deal with pressing problems like pollution and poverty:
A colder, greyer, post-Olympic world is coming into focus, a world in which most of China’s customers are cutting back on spending, inflation at home is running at least at 10% with no relief in sight, eroding the country’s competitiveness, and in which China must face the new challenges of maintaining high growth and social stability with the constraints of limited resources, energy shortages, concern over climate change and environmental exhaustion.
For the past decade, China’s cheap manufactured goods have helped its customers – in particular, the developed economies – to keep inflation low. Now, with its manufacturing costs rising, China is more likely to be a contributor to increasing prices internationally. Neither energy nor raw materials are likely to get cheaper, and the cost of migrant labour – hitherto the cheap input that has fuelled everything from rebuilding China’s cities to servicing its coastal factories – has risen sharply as industrial zones have spread inland and workers have found jobs closer to home. Employees have already made gains in wages and conditions, and many manufacturers, including Chinese firms, are looking at cheaper production sites.
Planners know China’s development model to date, while impressive in its results, is unsustainable: it is too carbon-intensive, too polluting and too inconsistent in its effects. Like every Asian tiger before it, China, the biggest tiger on the planet, has to meet the challenge of moving up the value chain, from T-shirts to hi-tech, from low-end production to high-value innovation, from energy-intensive to climate-friendly production. In recent years the early coastal industrial zones have begun to enter that stage, with waves of factory closures the harbingers of a new phase in the country’s development.
See also this recent article from chinadialogue.net by Wen Bo about what steps post-Olympic steps China needs to take to follow through on its environmental promises.
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- September 9, 2008 8:08 PM
China Bends A Bit For Anti-poverty Project
From Reuters:
A pilot project with a difference is making a dent in rural poverty and, more significantly, giving villagers a voice in the development of a pocket of southern China bypassed by the country’s economic boom.
What sets the scheme apart is that public funds to tackle poverty are being channelled through non-governmental organisations, a first in China.
In a country where NGOs have long been regarded with suspicion, this is nothing short of a seismic shift, according to the Asian Development Bank, which is meeting their overheads with a modest grant.
By sanctioning the project, Beijing is displaying the pragmatism that is a hallmark of its economic management.
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- August 4, 2008 5:04 AM
Paul Collier: China’s Investment in Africa
The New York-based Council on Foreign Relations today published an interview with Paul Collier, currently Professor of Economics and Director of the Center for the Study of African Economies at Oxford University. Formerly he was director of development research at the World Bank and advisor to the British government’s Commission on Africa. He is also the author of The Bottom Billion, a book about the citizens of a group of about 50 failing states whose seemingly unstoppable slide into more and more poverty has defied traditional approaches to development. Seventy percent of the bottom billion live in Africa. In his book, Collier analyzes the major reasons for failure in these countries by taking a closer look at four major traps: civil war, a dependence on the extraction and export of natural resources, bad neighbors, and bad governance. Here is the New York Times book review.
In his interview with CFR, Collier responds to a question about China’s role in Africa:
China is a growing presence on the African continent and could throw a wrench in any aid conditionality. What is your feeling on China’s investment in Africa?
China’s arrival on the scene is, in many respects, very good news for Africa. It’s pushed up commodity prices and it’s pushed down the cost of manufactured goods. So Africa is able to buy very cheap goods and get very high prices for its exports. The Chinese are an inadvertent charity in that they’re so big in the world that they manage to turn the terms of trade powerfully against themselves. That has shifted quite a lot of the benefits of Chinese growth from China to Africa. So we start with a big plus. The minus, of course, is that we’ve got the scramble for Africa part too, with China racing everyone else to the bottom in terms of standards of governance. So it’s important to try and pull back from that and agree [on] a set of common standards. If we try and get China to adhere to our standards, we’ve lost. But if we try and build a common set of standards with China, then that well might be feasible. Because the Chinese have always taken the long-term view and it’s not in China’s interest to build a new vintage of fragile states, some of which then fall into insecurity.
In his book, The Bottom Billion, Collier was somewhat less charitable:
So the growth of agglomerations in Asia has made the export diversification route more difficult for the bottom billion. Another effect of this growth is that Asian countries are increasingly desperate to secure supplies of natural resources. The Chinese are all over the countries of the bottom billion, securing natural resource deals. Superficially, this is good news: it is certainly raising prices, most obviously of oil, which some countries of the bottom billion export. But [with the] trap of poor policy, [...] high prices for resource exports are likely to chill the impetus for reform. [With] the conflict trap, [...] the spread of high natural resource prices increase[s] the risk of conflict. [And with] the natural resource trap, [...] natural resources are not the royal road to growth unless governance is unusually good. In the bottom billion it is already unusually bad, and the Chinese are making it worse, for they are none to sensitive when it comes to matters of governance. When Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe was looking for money to bail himself out of the ruinous consequences of his political choices, he came up with the “look east” strategy, East did not mean Russia, it meant China. And China has welcomed his overtures with open arms. The same goes for Angola. After the defeat of Jonas Savimbi’s UNITA, the developed countries finally decided to put the squeeze on the government of Angola, trying to clean up grotesque misuse of the oil money. China came in with over $4 billion in loans, and the Angolan government was off the hook. So the bottom billion are locked into natural resource exports twice over: by the threshold effects of Asian export agglomerations and by Asia’s desperate need for natural resources. (p. 86-87)
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- June 27, 2008 9:19 AM
Slideshow: Those Who Remain in Rural Zhejiang
A photographer from Haining City in Zhejiang presents his works of the countryside areas in Zhejiang on fengniao.com. Most of the photos were taken during Labor Day, National Day and Spring Festival in 2006 and 2007. Through these photos, we see that most of the younger generation in the rural areas have flocked to the cities. What’s left are old people, women and children. In some of the photos, we can see old people still work very hard to make a living, instead of being taken care of by their children like those in the cities. However, even though the younger generation who become migrant workers also work hard in the cities, many of them still don’t get paid or get paid late from the employers.
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- February 18, 2008 1:48 PM
Rural Poor Struggle on in China
The BBC reports from drought-plagues Ningxia, where residents are missing out on China’s economic growth:
Two hours south-west of Beijing by plane is Ningxia, the autonomous region known for its a big local minority of Muslim people – called the Hui, they make up around 17 percent of the population.
But Ningxia is also notable as an area where people are not sharing in China’s phenomenal growth. Poor anyway, the region has been further afflicted by two years of drought.
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- February 14, 2008 11:07 PM
Dichotomies Endure, But the Pressure Builds – Howard W. French
In the International Herald Tribune, Howard French writes about the gaps in China between capitalism and communism, rich and poor, and urban and rural lives:
At a casual glance, the giant boomtowns of the country’s east seem very much like first world cities, with the dizzyingly rapid proliferation of skyscrapers and expressways, shopping malls and traffic jams.
Travel a couple of hours inland to the west, though, and you can find parts of China that seem stuck in a past 20 or 30 years distant; places where subsistence is the rule and income levels hover closer to Africa than to the Group of 8-style wealth of Beijing’s dreams.
Or don’t travel at all. Poke around any big eastern city, and amid all of the frantic striving in this new culture of acquisition, and you can find deep pockets of the third world that persist just around many a street corner. [Full text]
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- January 20, 2008 9:21 PM
The Vagrants Behind the Wall – Laohumiao
From Global Voices Blog, original text by Laohumiao, translated by Meng Zhang:
Beijing, the host of 2008 Summer Olympics that has been prettified to be the highest honor and dream of the whole country, is trying to show every bright aspect of its stable and harmonious to the whole world, however, when you are almost convinced by the prosperous night scenes around the Forbidden City, you may never think behind some traditional Chinese-style walls, there is another totally different world.
Lao Humiao (老虎庙), a noted blogger and citizen journalist for his personal blog magazine–24hour, has published a series of reports on the homeless people who are living an unimaginably poor life in Beijing. Those shabby vagrants sleeping in their little box shelters are separated from the city’s bustling and flourishing only by an exquisite gray wall: [Full Text]
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- January 20, 2008 1:59 PM
A Late Night Phone Call – Xu Xing (徐星)
Beijing based writer Xu Xing wrote following post on his Xintianyou blog, thanks to M. J.’s translation:
The phone rang suddenly last Thursday at about two in the morning. An old friend of mine, a Latin American girl, was crying to me on the line: “Old Xu my friend, I can’t not call you…I had to call…you know, there, it’s hell, it’s like hell there…”
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- January 13, 2008 5:18 PM
Lives Of Poverty, Untouched By China’s Boom – Howard W. French
From New York Times:
When she gets sick, Li Enlan, 78, picks herbs from the woods that grow nearby instead of buying modern medicines. That is not a result of some philosophical choice, though. She has never seen a doctor and, like many residents of this area, lives in a meager barter economy, seldom coming into contact with cash.
“We eat somehow, but it’s never enough,” Ms. Li said. “At least we’re not starving.”
In this region of southern Henan Province, in village after village, people are too poor to heat their homes in the winter and many lack basic comforts like running water. Mobile phones, a near ubiquitous symbol of upward mobility throughout much of this country, are seen as an impossible luxury. People here often begin conversations with a phrase that is still not uncommon in today’s China: “We are poor.” [Full Text]
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- January 13, 2008 3:30 AM