China Declares An End To Poverty By 2020

China has openly declared war on poverty- even as the US’s own war on poverty had passed its 50th anniversary last year, marked with a fall from 26% in 1967 to 16% in 2014 (some measures that exclude the amount received via subsidies and food programs like SNAP indicate that the poverty rate has only stagnated over the period).

It has taken over five decades to cut the US poverty rate by less than half, at best… and according to RT, China hopes to eradicate poverty completely in no more than FIVE years.

“We have six years to eradicate all poverty,” Hong Tianyun, the deputy director of the government office tasked with ridding China of poverty told Reuters.

To meet the goal, the Chinese government has to lift about 12 million people out of poverty every year or about a million every month.

Despite the recent announcement, China had actually started fighting poverty just six years after the US’s program, in 1970. Since then the poverty rate has fallen from an alarming 85%, according to estimates, to just  7% as of 2012 according to Gallup. Huh, that’s below the US’s poverty rate, and over a shorter time frame. In this context, perhaps 5 years isn’t completely unrealistic. To be fair though, because the cost of living in China is much lower than the US, China’s official poverty line is much lower than America’s and thus probably easier for citizens to circumvent.

“In the past 15 years, China has lifted more than 600 million people out of poverty, accounting for about 70 percent of those brought out of poverty worldwide,” Tianyun said.

For those who still fall under the poverty line in China, times can be pretty harsh:

Around 70 million people, mostly in China’s countryside, lived below the poverty line of less than $376 (2,300 yuan) in annual income at the end of last year, the Xinhua news agency cited data from the National Bureau of Statistics. More than 200,000 people still have no access to power and millions lack a clean water supply.

In fact, China has the second highest number of “extremely poor” individuals in the world- though it has a below-average share of these people. This discrepancy is accounted for by its massive population:

The Chinese will need a lot of luck if they’re going to achieve their goals; a poverty rate of zero has never been achieved before, by any other nation developed or developing, largely because poverty is to some degree a relative term that rises as standards (and thus costs) of living rise- as more people are lifted out of poverty, the remainder become increasingly difficult to reach… Taiwan has the world’s lowest poverty rate at 1.16% as of 2010 according to the CIA World Fact Book.

Sources: RT, Washington Post, The CIA

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