Chinese President Xi Jinping recently claimed that his country had achieved the miracle of eradicating extreme poverty from rural China. Ever since Mr Xi came to power in 2012, he has made the eradication of rural poverty the central plank of his policy. As a result, nearly 100 million people have been lifted out of poverty.

Some experts contest the Chinese president’s claim. They have suggested that China has set too low a bar in its definition of poverty. Its extreme poverty threshold is set at $1.69 a day at the current exchange rates and $2.25 a day in 2011 prices after adjusting for purchasing parity.

The World Bank suggests that $1.90 a day is relevant only for low-income countries while the appropriate poverty threshold for lower-middle-income countries is $3.20 a day, for upper-middle-income countries $5.50 a day. The expert reservation implies that the claim of eradication of poverty may have been overstated.

However, some other experts have conceded that China has indeed accomplished an unprecedented feat of eradicating extreme poverty of the largest human population (100 million people). Some of them, however, have strong reservations about the sustainability of the anti-poverty drive.

China had to spend $800 billion to achieve the goal of eradicating rural poverty. There is no guarantee that China will be in a position to make such an investment yet again in case a large part of the Chinese population slips into poverty.

While the poverty identification threshold and sustainability of the poverty eradication initiative may be appropriate subjects for academic and polemic debates, the far more critical issue for us is the mechanism through which China accomplished this miracle.

Two words broadly define China’s anti-poverty initiative: targeted and precise. China assembled and dispatched 255,000 village-based working teams, more than 3 million workers of the Communist Party of China (CPC) and millions of other officials to 832 impoverished counties and 128,000 poor villages.

The government workers created a profile of every poor person in the country, based on four markers: family income, housing condition, lack of medical insurance, and whether any of the family members had dropped out of school. The workers used survey data and matched it with individuals and households to identify individuals living in poverty accurately.

As the workers surveyed each household, they assessed the working capacity of the household, whether a child was receiving adequate education and all the family members were healthy. They developed a national digital database to cover every registered village, household and individual. This ensured a precise identification of the poor people and mapped the cause of the poverty of each individual in the integrated database system.

Then the officials analysed their conditions and came up with tailor-made solutions to alleviate poverty. If a family was poor because of a lack of proper education, the proposed solution was to grant student loans and subsidies. If the poverty was caused by family members’ poor health, they were provided with suitable healthcare.

The government workers lived and ate and communicated with the local people in the 832 impoverished counties to better understand what they needed, how the poor people could shoulder responsibilities for poverty alleviation, and how to develop programmes that best suit their lifestyles.

The spirit behind the policy was to harness the indigenous talent to develop local industries and social enterprises managed by local cooperatives and by the local population. This had the salutary effect of preventing the local people from migrating to megacities because decent jobs were available at their doorstep.

All of the counties put in place industrial development policies and over 300,000 industrial bases in farming, planting, and processing were established. Over 96 million people were moved into 2.66 million newly constructed houses equipped with water, electricity, gas and internet.

China substantially factored in environmental quality in its drive against poverty. China used solar power for agriculture in many impoverished counties, and 1.1 million people were employed as ecological forest rangers, reducing both employment and creating environmental sensitivity.

E-commerce was also systematically promoted in China to fight poverty. Internet connectivity and other e-commerce related services integrated the impoverished counties with the global market.

China pursued a flexible policy in fighting poverty. The government has been continuously adjusting it rural development strategies to fit rapidly evolving socio-economic situations.

Anticipating the risk of falling into poverty again, China has made a massive investment in a well-rounded education. China upgraded 108,000 schools and drastically reduced dropouts by getting around 200,000 students to resume their education. It provided free vocational education to more than 8 million students from low-income families. China also made a massive investment in its healthcare system. Almost 99 percent of the impoverished counties were provided with basic medical insurance that covered up to 80 percent of the cost of hospitalisation. The life expectancy, which was 35 years before 1949, reached 77 years in 2020. The stark difference can hardly be ignored.

Pakistan, which has struggled with its intractable problem of poverty, must learn from China’s example. Some of the most crucial takeaways from China’s anti-poverty initiative are summarised here.

China pursued a flexible policy in fighting poverty. The government has been continuously adjusting rural development policy strategies to fit rapidly evolving socio-economic situations. This flexibility predates President Xi’s rise to power. In the late 1970s, or instance, the policy focused on boosting food production and maintaining grain self-sufficiency. In the 1990s, the focus shifted towards increased competitiveness of the rural economy through modernisation and diversification of economic activities. Since the 2010s, a more integrated and balanced rural policy seeks to ensure long-term food security through sustainable use of natural resources.

China has undertaken institutional innovation as a choice instrument to fight poverty. The emergence of farm mechanisation service providers enabled small-scale farmers to mechanise their cultivation activities without having heavy capital investment. The mechanisation of the agriculture sector reduced demand for labour and increased the time available for engaging in off-farm income opportunities.

Cooperative organisations provided a range of services to connect small-scale farmers to markets and introduced them to the latest technologies through training, collective marketing and input supply. Such institutional innovations are relevant for all countries with small and fragmented landholding structures, such as Pakistan.

China made a massive investment in infrastructure. Apart from investment in agricultural infrastructure such as irrigation and drainage, China made a massive investment in roads, communication, and the internet. Consequently, the farmers were more closely connected to the markets and facilitated manufacturing and service industries in the rural areas. Deeper coverage of internet services facilitated e-commerce, which helped maintain food supply chains during the Covid-19 pandemic. The e-commerce platforms also invested in logistics and marketing infrastructure and provided farmers training to adopt new technologies.

Strong social protection is another factor that has greatly facilitated the eradication of poverty from rural China. Rural health insurance and pensions have been the distinctive characteristics of rural China and have considerably bridged the gap between rural and urban social protection systems.

One of the effects of an expanded social protection system is that the aged farmers retire early from farming activities and transfer the farm assets to younger and more efficient operators, thus increasing the national productivity considerably.

Lifting over 100 million people out of extreme poverty is a human miracle in its own right and points to unique characteristics of the Chinese leadership quality and its political system. A closer inspection suggests that the Communist Party of China’s leadership, the personal commitment of President Xi, and the way the CPC was mobilised to alleviate poverty all played their crucial roles.

The CPC leadership not only gave directives and made slogans but actually implemented programmes through its organisational structure. The commitment of President Xi to the challenge of poverty alleviation can be measured from the fact that he visited scores of poverty-stricken villages and households since 2012. In a broader context, the year 2021 marks the 100^th anniversary of the Communist Party of China. The eradication of extreme poverty was one of the centenary goals of “the great rejuvenation of Chinese nation”.

The vast disconnect between the unabashed disclosure that Pakistan cannot buy the Covid-19 vaccine because it is too costly and a botched helicopter deal worth $1.5 billion between Pakistan and Turkey may show how our social policies are radically opposed to Chinese social policies.

The writer is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Economics at COMSATS University Islamabad, Lahore Campus