China province of 80 million claims only 17 people in poverty, sparking debate about official data
- The Chinese coastal province of Jiangsu has claimed only 17 residents out of a population of some 80 million remain in poverty
- The province is the first to declare a near elimination of absolute poverty as part of President Xi Jinping’s drive to wipe it out by 2020
A Chinese province of 80 million people has claimed that only 17 residents from six families remain in poverty, sparking intense debate about the veracity of official anti-poverty statistics.
China has yet to publish official statistics for all of 2019, but the government has said the number of people in poverty was cut to 16.6 million at the end of 2018 and an additional 10 million were lifted out of poverty last year.
Zhu Guobing, head of the Jiangsu Provincial Government Office of Poverty Alleviation, told the provincial legislature on Tuesday that more than 99.99 per cent of the province’s 2.54 million poor had been lifted out of extreme poverty – meaning they had an annual average income higher than 6,000 yuan (US$864) – since the anti-poverty programme started.
Jiangsu, part of China’s manufacturing heartland and export powerhouse, has the second largest economy of all provinces after Guangdong. Local gross domestic product expanded 6.4 per cent to 7.22 trillion yuan (US$1 trillion) in the first three quarters of 2019, according to data from the provincial statistics bureau.
While toasted by officials in Jiangsu, the province’s poverty alleviation figures have triggered intense debate online and fuelled concern that China’s anti-poverty efforts have become a numbers game.
“What a coincidence, I am just one of those 17 people,” one person quipped on Weibo, China’s Twitter-like social network, with a hashtag reading “Jiangsu has only 17 people in poverty”.
By Tuesday night the hashtag was among the top three most popular topics on the platform before it was removed from the trending rankings. The original report about Zhu’s remarks has also been removed from the website of the Yangtze Evening Post, although other versions are still accessible in mainland media outlets.
But the efforts, which have helped change some negative perceptions about China’s rural population, still face scepticism from many observers.
Zheng Yongnian, director of the East Asian Institute at the National University of Singapore, said the poverty alleviation programme, while well intervention, had caused a series of problems like subsidising people who were lazy.
Other experts have said China’s current absolute poverty line is too low for a middle-income country based on World Bank criteria.
Li Xiaoyun, an adviser to the State Council Leading Group Office of Poverty Alleviation, said recently at a forum in Beijing that more than 30 million people were at risk of falling back into poverty if the poverty line was to be lifted to a daily per capita income of US$3.2 from US$1.9, based on World Bank data.
