Chinese Definition of Poverty

THE PEOPLE's REPUBLIC of China has one of the fastest-growing economies in the world today. With 1.3 billion people, it also has the largest population on earth. China claims it has been very successful in reducing the number of people living in poverty. In 1978 the Chinese government reported that 250 million people lived in poverty. In 2005, the number was reportedly down to 28 million.

However, this is according to the Chinese govern-ment's definition of poverty as an income of $.66 (66 cents) a day or $240.90 per year. By comparison, an American teenager staffing the drive-up window at a fast-food restaurant and earning $6.10 an hour makes more than that each week.

In the United States, poverty is defined as $9,645 or less a year for a single person living alone. For a family of five (for example, a single mother with four children), the U.S. Census Bureau sets the poverty threshold at $22,199 or less per year.

The causes of poverty in China are many and varied. Chief among them are adverse natural conditions and government corruption. In 1978, China introduced policies ending communist centralized agricultural planning. It returned land used for communal farms to individual families, restoring family farms. Freeing up the productive capacity of hundreds of millions has become the single largest factor in helping China's rural poor escape poverty. In the communal farm system, the emphasis had not been on production, but on advancing politically. The result was cronyism and sagging productivity.

With traditional farms restored, incentives would seem to be back for farmers to profit personally from [Page 165]hard work, risk-taking, and increased productivity. However, the Chinese government's claims of vast gains are not to be believed, according to a best-selling book published in China in 2003 that was abruptly pulled from bookstore shelves in 2004 after selling more than 150,000 copies in a matter of weeks. The 460-page report, A Survey of Chinese Peasants, alleges that after years of celebrated agrarian reforms and impressive claims by the Chinese government, many remote Chinese villages are still farming in primitive conditions and have again fallen into deep poverty.

The authors charge that the benefits that peasants gained from reforms largely disappeared because of corruption. In the past decade, rural tax burdens have increased four to five times, with as many as 360 different fees imposed by all levels of government. A farmer, says the book, has to pay three times more taxes than a city resident even though his annual income is only one-sixth that of an urban dweller. Sometimes the taxes are the result of a corrupt political system that gives far too much authority to a select few.

The authors tell of the death of a young villager named Ding Zuoming. In 1993, Ding uncovered corruption among village communist officials after one-third of his and other villagers’ annual income was taken as taxes. When he organized the farmers to request an audit, local police beat him to death. The villagers rebelled when the local authorities tried to cover it up as an accident, and central authorities finally intervened to punish the killers. Even so, justice has not been done. When the authors visited Ding's family, all three of his children had been forced out of school because of poverty. His wife had broken an arm while working, his mother lay paralyzed in bed, and his father was too ill to work.

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