Tag: Poverty

China excels through simple attitudes

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By Nnanda Kizito Sseruwagi

I recently travelled to Beijing to participate in the 3rd Conference on Dialogue Between Chinese and African Civilizations organized by the China Africa Institute (CAI).

In preparation for the conference, the organizers asked what topic I would prefer to discuss. I chose to contribute to the one on promoting Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) cooperation by sharing development experience between China and Africa. This is because, as a recent graduate, I have reflected deeply on the most significant ways I can contribute to my country and the African continent and resolved that it’s through adding to our capacities for economic development and social transformation.  This conference provided me an opportunity to contribute knowledge and also learn from other experts and scholars on development, especially around the world’s biggest development finance initiative by comrade Xi Jinping- the BRI.

I moderated a panel of knowledgeable persons including Prof. Zhang Zhenke, the Director and Professor of the Center for African Studies at Nanjing University; Prof. Yusufu Ali Zoaka, who teaches Policy Analysis and Development Studies at the University of Abuja in Nigeria; Mr. Wang Yongzhong, the Director and Research Fellow at the International Commodities Division of the Institute of World Economics and Politics (IWES) at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS); Prof. Leon-Marie Nkolo Ndjodo of the University of Maroua in Cameroon and Prof. Wang Qilong, the Changjiang Scholar of the Ministry of Education in China and Vice President and Professor at Xi’an International Studies University, among other experts.

After the conference, we flew from Beijing to Fujian Province in South Eastern China. There we drove by road from Fuzhou city to Ningde city, up to Xiaqi village- a boat dwellers settlement which boasts the successes of poverty alleviation in Ningde city.

It was easier on this trip to be overwhelmed by the majesty of infrastructure projects undertaken by the Chinese government, which most first-time travellers from developing countries feel when they visit developed countries. I was also impressed but not by the greatness of the state of China as experienced through such projects, rather by the sheer dedication, discipline and meticulous detail of every Chinese peasant and elite while doing their work.

For thousands of miles across cities and country roads, one sees that every building, every walkway, every street and every tree along the road has been cared for and maintained with religious dedication.

It is easier for the government to oversee imposing projects such as the long bridges across rivers and lakes or the tunnels through mountains to ease road transport. But the hardest thing to achieve is to instill discipline in every citizen to maintain these works.

No government has the reach let alone the grasp to compel a billion people to avoid vandalism, or littering, or to obey traffic rules or clean their homes. In fact, police officers and soldiers were absent from the public. Everyone in these cities enforces discipline by themselves without the vivid coercion and gun-wielding we see in Kampala. I last saw a gun at Entebbe International Airport and the first thing I saw as I disembarked from the plane to access the airport terminal on my return was a submachine gun wielded by a police officer! One wonders how and why a society so obsessed with coercing order as Uganda is, remains so disorganized.

I pondered deeply about order and public hygiene because I realized that it is one of the things a society can have regardless of the functionality of the government. We can blame the government for bad roads, but who shall we blame for failing to make our beds? Or failing to keep away from grass in public spaces? Or failing to dump rubbish in dustbins? Or failing to obey traffic rules?

Many things can make a society function regardless of whether the government has money to provide public goods and services, or whether it is corrupt. These are the things that impressed me most about China. These simple attitudes among its people.

Xiaqi village is one of the most backward places in China. It has peasants who were homeless boat-dwellers thirty years ago. Although one may be impressed by the poverty alleviation undertaken by the government of China in resettling them into decent housing and availing them of social services, I was mostly impressed by their order. Every household has at least two dustbins. The dustbins looked cleaner than they were expected to be. There was not a single piece of litter in their backyards. Not even a cigarette residue. Every flower tree along the roads from this village up to Ningde city looked tendered for with peerless attention. And the roads seemed to be mopped daily. But it’s all because everyone cares not to litter and everyone maintains public facilities in good shape.

No government has the capacity to oversee such dedication and discipline among its citizens to achieve this level of civilization. And citizens needn’t wait for the government of their choice to take personal initiative to tidy up their environment or maintain the few public facilities available. To me, this was the most impressive development in China. And we do not need China’s GDP to attain such social order in Uganda.

nnandakizito@dwcug.org

The author is a senior research fellow, Development Watch Centre.

Four Decades and 800M People Out of Poverty: Lessons From China’s Poverty Alleviation Approach

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George Musiime

At the dawn of African independence, Kwame Nkrumah is quoted to have said “Seek ye first the political Kingdom and all else shall be added unto you.” However, as reality has proved to us, whereas political freedom might have been a necessary condition for Africa’s economic freedom, some analysts contend that this was not necessarily a sufficient condition for economic freedom. Economic freedom takes rigorous and meticulous efforts and something has been lacking in the post independence-African effort. Evidence of this is the persistence of poverty as a major challenge faced by all African like many other states in the global south to date.

On the contrary, one nation that has been able to make massive progress in as far as stamping out poverty is concerned is China. The People’s Republic of China stands tall above all as a nation that has managed to lift out of extreme poverty nearly 800 Million Chinese over the past 40 years. To put this into context, this is the equivalent of 54% of Africa’s total population today or 20 Million people out of poverty each year over the past 40years. Even, the World Bank has credited China with a contribution of almost three quarters to total global poverty reduction, but how was China able to do this? A simple answer to this Question according to president Xi Jinping is;  Based on China’s unique national conditions and following the law of poverty reduction, China adopted a series of extraordinary policies and measures, and constructed a whole set of systems covering policy, work and institutions, which blazed a poverty reduction path forming an anti-poverty theory with Chinese characteristics.

Otherwise, what would the idea of shared prosperity mean on the global stage if it did not hold true at home? This is why China first sought shared prosperity for its own people.  Particularly, in the fight against poverty, the country is a beacon of hope for ending global poverty; one the rest of the world needs to emulate. According to President Xi, a key mission of the Communist Party of China is to eradicate poverty, improve people’s living standards, and gradually achieve common prosperity for all. In fact, if Africa and the rest of the world seek inspiration, there is no better or more credible source of inspiration than China when it comes to poverty eradication.

The Chinese poverty alleviation campaign employed a two-pronged approach focusing on stimulating economic growth through deliberately driving economic transformation and the creation of new opportunities especially for the poor members of society. Additionally, the government undertook direct initiatives with a bias towards disadvantaged areas with an underlying lack of access to opportunities but also focusing on poor and vulnerable households all across the board. This is a different approach to rolling out blanket-universal poverty alleviation programs without necessarily identifying the nature and context of people that need to be helped out of poverty. This coupled with well-developed infrastructure and developed human capital catapulted China to the attainment of the goal of eradicating poverty by the year 2020.

A key fundamental of this approach is realizing that national level poverty manifestation is always going to be the cumulative outcome of poverty at the individual level, household level, and community level all the way up to the national level. This is why president Xi, while speaking in the northern province of Hebei in 2012 declared the need for well-focused measures to help country-men facing difficulties out of poverty. This would follow from understanding the situation of every poor citizen, and every household in China, through a series of steps starting from Awareness campaigns, application reviews, door-to-door investigations, deliberate disclosures at the village level, examination of disclosures at the township level and eventual approval at the national level. This meticulous trickle-down procedure intended to weed out “fake beneficiaries” allowing all efforts to be directed at the most deserving members of society.

To accomplish this, the government assembled and deployed Poverty alleviation cadres all across the nation. Moreover, critical to the poverty alleviation effort was maintaining a database of all impoverished households keeping data such as; identification and evaluation data, causes of poverty, assistance plans, incomes and expenditures of impoverished households, policies and guarantees received, relevant agreements,  et cetera . This data not only helped with targeting interventions based on the unique situation of the poor households but also with both evaluation of effectiveness of the approaches as well as ensuring people do not slip back into poverty once they have been liberated through monitoring and hence sustaining the gains of the nation’s poverty alleviation efforts.

As countries looking to help our people out of poverty, we like China at the onset might have made significant gains on the fronts of investment in infrastructure and human capital, however, we are lacking when it comes to deeper understanding of our people, the causes of their poverty et cetera. The Makerere University, college of humanities and social sciences for example identifies, health challenges, unemployment, lack of access to productive resources such as land, credit and market information as the leading causes of persistent poverty. These causes are not universally crosscutting thus there is no one size-fits-all measure of poverty alleviation. To use the words of president Xi, the design of poverty alleviation programs should be based on the unique conditions of the intended beneficiaries.  For example, the development of labor-intensive industries to absorb skilled unemployed labor force, skilling campaigns for those poor due to a lack of the necessary skills for the available job market, providing market incentives to spur production hence creating competitive labor markets et cetera: an approach where we addressed each unique instance of poverty through its own unique intervention. Unless we develop a deeper understanding of the nature and context of the problem we seek to address, we may still struggle to attain economic freedom for our people.

George Musiime is a research fellow at the Sino-Uganda Research Centre.

 

Fighting Extreme Poverty: Lessons from China’s Poverty Eradication Initiative

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By Balongoofu Daniel

The world bank under the poverty and inequality Platform (PIP) as of march 2023 assessed global poverty from a period of 2020 with special focus on the global south that to a larger extent is victimized by this catastrophe. The prevailing data collected from nations with functional grid systems that track levels of poverty indicate that the global head count ratio increased by 0.1 percent to 8.5 percent resulting into a revision in the number of people living in extreme poverty from 648 million to 659 million additionally from south Asia with about 5 million people, The middle east and North Africa contributing 4 million people resulting into an increase of about 11 million people living in extreme poverty hence forth.

Focusing on sub-Saharan Africa, the provisional data indicates that the global head count ratio as of march 2023 stands at about 86.4 percent and the number of poor people estimated to be about 969 million. This speaks volumes of what needs to be done to check these sharp rising poverty trends especially in this part of the world.

This to occur, countries in Global South may have to learn from other countries where the war against poverty has been successful. For example, picking from China, a self-established model in poverty eradication, African countries can learn more on how to successfully contain poverty. Arguably, China is of a great lesson to the global south and Sub-Saharan Africa in this fight that the nation evolved from a history not alien to the prevailing social-political and economic structure of the sub-Saharan region. Right from atrocities being war torn by both civil wars, the fight against colonialism, food insecurity and a big growing population with limited resources at the time. The nation embarked on a long journey of strategic self-transformation and creating of opportunities that have made it the worlds production hub and the second largest economy.

In February of 2021, president Xi announced that extreme poverty had been eradicated in the nation in what he termed as a miracle. He announced that; “Through combined efforts of the whole party and the entire nation, China has secured a complete victory in its fight against poverty in this important year”.

The unification of China by the CPC in 1949 followed major land reforms that the government under took as the first measure. It should be noted that the period during the 30-year long wars characterized with both civil and fights against the Japanese colonialists at the time which followed a complete institutional and national break down by fighting war lords who divided the nation into territories and taxed the people to fund their wars hence contributing to the acute levels of poverty. The land reforms saw the elimination of the first major institutional obstacle since the state retained exclusive rights to the land that later saw investment in improved farmlands irrigation which gave the peasants modern farming trainings and employment. The land reform also saw a redistribution of land to peasants and tenants who then acquired land which encouraged wide scale agricultural production through cooperatives later in 1953.  The government as well heavily invested in rural education, medical services as major roots and basis that the current 27 trillion dollars economy inherits.

Later during 1978, China registered great success over the poverty elimination fight under the central collective leadership of president Deng Xiaoping that declared poverty as not being socialism therefore the party undertook efforts here to liberalize the Chinese market through opening it up for foreign direct investments and commercial production. This attracted investors with huge capitals that drastically promoted value addition on the locally produced agricultural produce of which the huge population provided a ready market necessary for-profit maximization.

It should be noted that the government as well took strategic reforms to accord the high-tech state-owned enterprises that drove the of value addition initially a level of autonomy that they were to compete with other private enterprises, determine production and supply and drive reinvestment of the profits accumulated. This strategically introduced the capitalistic traits of profit maximization hence gradually abandoning the socialistic home-based production. This resulted into a massive average GDP growth of about 8.2 percent per year on average between 1978 and 2020.therefore as a result, on average there were 18.7 fewer poor people in China since 1978 hence the miracle that president Xi highlighted in his victory speech.

China’s fight against corruption is commendable and cannot be ignored while addressing the fight against poverty. It should be noted that this cancer has greatly undermined the gains of economic development especially in sub–Saharan Africa therefore the global south aught to borrow a leaf from China’s defeat of this vice. From the 1970s when China begun to carry out the policy reforms and opening up, The CPC government at the time took very stringent measures against economic crimes such as smuggling, embezzlement and taking bribes. The road to combating this cancer featured addressing of both the symptoms and the root causes of corruption. Comprehensive treatment and gradual intensification of efforts to eliminate the root causes of economic crimes were deployed and till the 21st century, China has constantly expanded the corruption prevention frame work from special prevention of individual corruption to preventive work and administrative examination with approval, financial management and cadre personal system reforms under the national bureau of corruption prevention to co ordinate the work of combating this vice and holding victims accountable by both the law and national publicity. It should be noted that China has been effective in fighting this vice which has made it swift for the implementation of these poverty eradication programs.

Conclusively, the new battle against poverty is now carried on by president Xi’s tenure. After the tremendous successes in fighting poverty which in saw Beijing announcing it had realized its first centenary goal – building a moderately prosperous society in all respects and president Xi declaring that the country was embarking on what he described as “marching in confident strides toward the second centenary goal of building China into a great modern socialist country in all respects,” he called for implementation of newer strategies to lift the remaining poor to prosperity. The new strategies call for identifying the most vulnerable, then analysis is done on the root causes of poverty. These programs have been decentralized to the lowest political composition of society that help in implementation and accountability to the central government and it should be however noted that the present-day mechanisms involve elements of poverty relief dispatched by the government directly to the affected people among special transformational programs such as electrification and connectivity through roads to encourage economic transformation and productivity. As other countries in the global south such as Uganda come up with programs meant to fight poverty such as Parish Development Model, China offers a rich pool of expertise where we can draw lessons on how to successfully end extreme poverty.

Balongoofu Daniel is a Junior Research Fellow at Sino-Uganda Research Centre

 

 

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