another bumper crop for me
his orange business has blossomed over
the past few years
so much that he can now afford a brick
house a sign of wealth in belgium
a rural county in central china
me says all of this was made possible by
government assistance
village officials and the government
were very helpful in poverty alleviation
they helped develop the orchards
orchard is our main source of income
here and they supported it well
i can earn up to 5 000 euros a year
right now
me is the shining example of china's
goal to eradicate extreme poverty by
2021.
in 2014 president xi jinping announced
relief strategies to aid the poor
government officials went door to door
to assess household income and provided
aid
now beijing says it's achieved its
target
almost 100 million rural impoverished
population
have been lifted out of poverty
the hazardous task of eradicating
absolute poverty
creating another incredible miracle
but some critics say xi's official
version isn't the full story
they say his government set the poverty
threshold too low
here in belgium some farmers who have
officially escaped poverty
still struggle lucino says his harvest
has not improved
despite government aid to diversify his
crops
i have two sons who go outside to work
for others when they're free
they can earn some money to sustain our
living i'm nearly 70 and my wife is over
60.
we cannot work like this our living is
in such a poor shape
leo and his family of five wish to move
to a better home
like others they know but for now they
have to stay in this wooden house
which does little to keep them warm the
67 year old still hopes that one day
his farm will bring them the world he
has long wished for
joining us is john donaldson of
singapore management university john
when beijing says it has eradicated
poverty
what does that mean and is it an
accurate statement
well there were two important words that
xi jinping said when when he
when he made that uh the announcement
recently uh declaring victory
one was uh rural so it has nothing to do
with urban poverty and the other one was
absolute poverty so what they're
claiming is that
uh you know in terms of a relatively low
poverty line
that that is what the entire population
is under
now is it true i don't know any serious
scholar who thinks that
china has even in terms of absolute
rural poverty
has eradicated poverty uh has china made
a humongous
leap forward has it made a contribution
that is very very likely to be true
and so what more does the country need
to do in its fight against uh you
mentioned rule versus urban i don't know
if you want to focus on one over the
other and of course the growing
inequality divide there
and those are three very very important
issues all three of them
are very difficult to tackle and you
have to tackle them differently
in terms of rural poverty china should
not be
letting their foot off the gas the fear
is that by declaring victory over
poverty
people including many chinese people
will think oh that means that we've
we've eliminated poverty when what they
really have done
is if their claims are true eliminated
the most severe point of
forms of poverty they there are still
poor people
in rural china today and so they need to
keep their foot on the pedal
urban poverty is very different because
you're
talking about layoffs and other kinds of
things that thrust
working working people into uh poverty
uh standards of living
and so very very different kinds of
tools that you would need
to attack urban poverty as opposed to
rural
and of course they're linked because men
much of the urban poverty
are folks who are coming in from the
countryside looking for work
and other things like that and so by
reducing rural poverty
some ways what you're doing is shifting
it from the rural areas into the cities
now we've danced around this a little
bit but how much of this is driven by
propaganda the need to sort of spread
certain messages
well i take it on two different levels i
do think xi jinping is taking poverty
seriously
i think xi jinping really should be
applauded for taking poverty seriously
nobody is suggesting that this is pure
propaganda in the sense that they're
just cooking the books
down in in local china and rural china
when i have a chance to visit
uh you know which i do basically every
year that there's not a pandemic around
uh i can see that local government
officials are taking it very seriously
on the other side xi jinping had to
bring it down to zero
as soon as he made the pledge in 2015
you knew that
they were going to announce success and
just to put this in context how are
other countries in the region doing
compared to china
based on metrics you go by
well the truth is every country
struggles with uh
you know struggles with poverty you know
from singapore to
uh you know to germany to to america and
so
poverty is something that you know
really humanity cannot let its
uh it's you know it cannot stop paying
attention to
we will always have to be dealing with
poverty at least for the for be
a foreseeable future uh in terms of
countries nearby
uh countries like cambodia and laos and
vietnam uh
you know all are struggling uh with
poverty
uh fortunately the worldwide poverty
rate is going down right but much of
that is actually generated by
china john donaldson thank you so much
for your time
thank you