China has moved more people out of poverty than any other country in recent decades, but the persistence of destitution in places like southern Henan Province fits with the findings of a recent World Bank study that suggests that there are still 300 million poor in China -- three times as many as the bank previously estimated. Poverty is most severe in China's geographic and social margins, whether the mountainous areas or deserts that ring the country, or areas dominated by ethnic minorities, who for cultural and historic reasons have benefited far less than others from the country's long economic rise. But it also persists in places like Henan, where population densities are among the greatest in China, and the new wealth of the booming coast beckons, almost mockingly, a mere province away. <...> Other experts say Henan and other heavily populated parts of the Chinese heartland are often excluded from the financial support that goes to the coastal areas, and what antipoverty measures there are have little effect. Typically, residents of those areas say, money intended for them is appropriated by corrupt local officials, who pocket it or divert it to business investments. Paradoxically, they say, they are overlooked precisely because of their proximity to the major economic centers of the east, forced to fend for themselves on the theory that they can make do with income sent home by migrant laborers and other forms of trickle-down wealth. "Previous poverty alleviation policy focused more on western China, places like Gansu, Qinghai or Guizhou, which were poorer," said Wang Xiaolu, deputy director of the National Economic Research Institute, a Beijing nongovernmental organization. "Besides, the situation in the border regions is more complicated, because if things go wrong there, it becomes more than a poverty problem. That's why policy leaned toward them." <...> Many more people in this part of Henan subsist between the official poverty line and the $1 a day standard long used by the World Bank. The World Bank's estimate of the number of poor people in China was tripled to 300 million from 100 million last month, after a new survey of prices altered the picture of what a dollar can buy. The new standard was set according to what economists call purchasing power parity. By the new calculations, estimates of the overall size of the Chinese economy also shrank by 40 percent.
Poverty is most severe in China's geographic and social margins, whether the mountainous areas or deserts that ring the country, or areas dominated by ethnic minorities, who for cultural and historic reasons have benefited far less than others from the country's long economic rise.
But it also persists in places like Henan, where population densities are among the greatest in China, and the new wealth of the booming coast beckons, almost mockingly, a mere province away.
<...>
Other experts say Henan and other heavily populated parts of the Chinese heartland are often excluded from the financial support that goes to the coastal areas, and what antipoverty measures there are have little effect. Typically, residents of those areas say, money intended for them is appropriated by corrupt local officials, who pocket it or divert it to business investments.
Paradoxically, they say, they are overlooked precisely because of their proximity to the major economic centers of the east, forced to fend for themselves on the theory that they can make do with income sent home by migrant laborers and other forms of trickle-down wealth.
"Previous poverty alleviation policy focused more on western China, places like Gansu, Qinghai or Guizhou, which were poorer," said Wang Xiaolu, deputy director of the National Economic Research Institute, a Beijing nongovernmental organization. "Besides, the situation in the border regions is more complicated, because if things go wrong there, it becomes more than a poverty problem. That's why policy leaned toward them."
Many more people in this part of Henan subsist between the official poverty line and the $1 a day standard long used by the World Bank. The World Bank's estimate of the number of poor people in China was tripled to 300 million from 100 million last month, after a new survey of prices altered the picture of what a dollar can buy. The new standard was set according to what economists call purchasing power parity. By the new calculations, estimates of the overall size of the Chinese economy also shrank by 40 percent.
Amartya Sen argues that many third world intellectuals are unable to get past the experience of colonialism to see the value of western institutions and values--and the parallels they have with the best of their own traditions. You conform to Sen's model.
), he brings to bear a lot of relevant information and makes a lot of very thought-provoking points.
I'd like to read the whole exchange again more thoroughly, but this particular line is the most important that struck out for me:
Our concern in the west should be to help China face its enormous challenges without damaging us in the process.
The key word there being help.
I don't understand Chinese culture or thinking well enough to read how they consider and respond to Western criticism. My sense is that they are quite prickly, but I think in general, despite their pride, the current level of Western criticism, farcically self-righteous, supercilious, and one-sided though it may be, nevertheless, on balance does more good than harm by keeping up the pressure towards reform, liberalization, and democratization.
The danger, however, is in going too far and reaching a point where we insult and alienate them more than we prod and incent them.
I think when China started opening up, the predominant thrust of Western and Japanese interest in that country was one of almost megalomaniacal greed, with a streak of contempt in it: China as gigantic supply of cheap coolie labor, and potentially massive market for their goods. However, now the Western and Japanese attitude towards China strikes me as primarily one of fear, uncertainty, and a different sort of contempt (an outgrowth of fear and uncertainty rather than of greed), from which spring much of the venom in the criticism against China (I wonder if a similar emotional dynamic is not also active in Western criticism of Putinian Russia.)
No doubt, China still has some very serious problems that it must overcome.
But I believe that they are making progress and that things are improving, if slowly, from a human rights and also an economic point of view, even for the poorest (albeit not quickly enough for too many of them). As Will Hutton enumerates, there is an incredibly complicated set of interrelated challenges and social, economic, political, and environmental forces which play off of one another, and improving things in one area, can mean inviting chaos and/or harm in other areas. This is the reason for the extreme caution by the government, which can seem so reactionary and oppressive, and which, particularly on the local levels, remains so plagued by corruption.
To emphasize, I still do not understand enough about China to affirm with conviction what should be the best way to help China move forward. But my current sense is that while maintaining the pressure on China to conform to certain values, principles and standards that we believe should apply universally, we should also refrain from our customary (and from non-Western points of view, often hypocritical) moral self-righteousness, and we should gradually shift towards a position of pragramatically firm while rhetorically understated policy actions, such as imposing carbon taxes on imports (but not just on China, which would obviously be insulting and antagonistic, but on all exporting countries), combined with a stance of sympathy and cooperation -- particularly in the media -- to help the Chinese help themselves, so to speak. Truth unfolds in time through a communal process.
