When Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) last visited Lankao County, it was famous for two things — poverty and the government official who reputedly died trying to end it.
Three years later, the hardscrabble area has undergone a Cinderella-like transformation, waltzing across the national poverty line just in time for the Chinese Communist Party’s twice-a-decade congress that opens on Wednesday next week.
With its freshly paved roads, modern community center and memorial to Xi’s visit, Lankao’s Zhangzhuang village has become a showpiece for the president’s ambitious and politically critical campaign to wipe out rural poverty by 2020.
Photo: AFP
However, a drastically different picture emerges on the outskirts, where farmers still live in ramshackle homes and move along rutted lanes.
The contrast highlights the difficulty of spreading the wealth of the world’s second-largest economy, a central mission for Xi as he prepares to accept a second five-year term as general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party.
Success is crucial for the credibility of the party, which came to power promising a radical redistribution of the nation’s wealth, and it would help solidify Xi’s stature as the most powerful leader in decades.
In the three years since Xi’s visit, Lankao’s official poverty rate dropped from 12 percent to less than 2 percent, making it just the second county to be removed from a national registry of almost 600 poor areas.
Officials attribute the success to better directed aid and low-interest micro-loans that have helped needy families increase their income by buying livestock and farming equipment, but Xi also took personal responsibility for the area of more than 760,000 in 2014 as part of a program that paired top party leaders with local governments.
He chose Lankao — and Zhangzhuang specifically — for its association with Jiao Yulu (焦裕祿), an official who became a national hero after famously working himself to death helping farmers eke out a living along the flood-prone Yellow River five decades ago.
The president’s visit “gave us encouragement and inspiration,” said local official Wang Qifu, speaking by a massive monument to Jiao in the bustling county seat.
After the president visited, “doing poorly wouldn’t do,” Wang said.
However, life in Xi’s dream village is surrounded by another reality.
While everyone agrees Lankao has changed enormously since Xi’s visits in March and May 2014, those on Zhangzhuang’s outskirts complain the gains have not been equitable.
The backs of houses along the road to the village have been whitewashed to give the appearance of wealth, but on the other side, narrow, muddy streets run past homes with broken windows and crumbling bricks.
“We haven’t seen any changes here,” said one elderly woman, a farmer who declined to give her name. “The people with connections to the village government have all shaken off poverty. Those without connections haven’t.”
Many residents still feel poor, complaining there is little money in farming and earning more means moving to urban areas.
To tackle the problem, the county has encouraged cooperatives to grow more profitable crops such as melons, established industrial parks and also dedicated several large memorials to Jiao — and its own Xi-fueled success — hoping “red tourism” would create much-needed jobs.
A busload of Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs employees sporting Chinese Communist Party lapel pins recently made the pilgrimage, stopping at Jiao’s memorial hall and a village that has prospered by making traditional Chinese instruments.
In May, 27-year-old Peng Biao — a village official — and his wife turned their family home near the Yellow River into a small, stylish restaurant, hoping to cash in on the tourism boom.
Three dishes cost about 40 yuan (US$6.50), almost a week’s income for one of the 23 households still on the village’s poverty list.
Lankao has made good progress, Peng said, but if the county cannot create more jobs “it’s just a bubble economy. On the surface, people may seem well-off, but actually, they won’t have even a single yuan in their wallet.”
Ahead of the congress, state media have heavily promoted the “Lankao Model” and the “Jiao Yulu spirit” to combat poverty.
According to official figures, about 700 million have escaped poverty since China began its economic reforms in 1978, but the gap between rich and poor “has become quite alarming” for Beijing, said Cheng Li (鄭立), an expert on Chinese leadership at Washington’s Brookings Institution. “The whole thing about China’s economic rise is you see the economic disparity has become a bottleneck.”
Last year, about 43.3 million rural residents still lived below the nation’s official poverty line of 2,300 yuan a year at 2010 prices, according to official statistics.
The threshold changes based on location, but Lankao’s US$460 is still well below the US$694 that the World Bank considers “extreme poverty.”
Achieving Xi’s goal of “moderate prosperity” by 2020 could prove difficult even for a county that has benefited from the president’s support.
“In other places it might not be a big problem, but we just shook off poverty,” Wang said.
SEEKING CHANGE: A hospital worker said she did not vote in previous elections, but ‘now I can see that maybe my vote can change the system and the country’ Voting closed yesterday across the Solomon Islands in the south Pacific nation’s first general election since the government switched diplomatic allegiance from Taiwan to Beijing and struck a secret security pact that has raised fears of the Chinese navy gaining a foothold in the region. The Solomon Islands’ closer relationship with China and a troubled domestic economy weighed on voters’ minds as they cast their ballots. As many as 420,000 registered voters had their say across 50 national seats. For the first time, the national vote also coincided with elections for eight of the 10 local governments. Esther Maeluma cast her vote in the
Nearly half of China’s major cities are suffering “moderate to severe” levels of subsidence, putting millions of people at risk of flooding, especially as sea levels rise, according to a study of nationwide satellite data released yesterday. The authors of the paper, published by the journal Science, found that 45 percent of China’s urban land was sinking faster than 3mm per year, with 16 percent at more than 10mm per year, driven not only by declining water tables, but also the sheer weight of the built environment. With China’s urban population already in excess of 900 million people, “even a small portion
UNSETTLING IMAGES: The scene took place in front of TV crews covering the Trump trial, with a CNN anchor calling it an ‘emotional and unbelievably disturbing moment’ A man who doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire outside the courthouse where former US president Donald Trump is on trial has died, police said yesterday. The New York City Police Department (NYPD) said the man was declared dead by staff at an area hospital. The man was in Collect Pond Park at about 1:30pm on Friday when he took out pamphlets espousing conspiracy theories, tossed them around, then doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire, officials and witnesses said. A large number of police officers were nearby when it happened. Some officers and bystanders rushed
HYPOCRISY? The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs yesterday asked whether Biden was talking about China or the US when he used the word ‘xenophobic’ US President Joe Biden on Wednesday called for a hike in steel tariffs on China, accusing Beijing of cheating as he spoke at a campaign event in Pennsylvania. Biden accused China of xenophobia, too, in a speech to union members in Pittsburgh. “They’re not competing, they’re cheating. They’re cheating and we’ve seen the damage here in America,” Biden said. Chinese steel companies “don’t need to worry about making a profit because the Chinese government is subsidizing them so heavily,” he said. Biden said he had called for the US Trade Representative to triple the tariff rates for Chinese steel and aluminum if Beijing was