The “China Miracle” has been to lift 660 million people out of poverty over the past 30-plus years, Chinese state news media said Friday, the country’s first “Poverty Alleviation Day.”
In fact, since it began to overhaul its economy over 30 years ago, China has overseen “the biggest poverty relief in the history of human society,” Xinhua, the state news agency, said. More than 90 percent of global poverty relief in that time occurred in China, it said. By commemorating the day, the country was adopting international practice: Oct. 17 is the United Nations’ “ International Day for the Eradication of Poverty.”
Yet there was ambiguity about the true number of poor people in China. Xinhua said the 660 million figure was based on international poverty standards, which, according to the World Bank, is defined by living on less than $1.25 a day. According to Chinese standards, 250 million people had been lifted out of poverty in the over 30-year time frame. China’s poverty level is now set at 2,300 renminbi a year, or a little over $1 a day. It did not specify what its previous poverty standards were. In a speech in June, Prime Minister Li Keqiang said that 200 million people remained in poverty in China, though the Xinhua report put the figure at 80 million.
After nearly four decades of fast-paced economic growth during which the country has become the world’s second-largest economy, after the United States, China has lifted more than 500 million out of poverty since 1978, the World Bank said.
Since that year, when China embarked on an ambitious plan to overhaul its economy after about three decades of economic stagnation and political turmoil, the creation of wealth and better living standards have been a mainstay of the Communist Party’s legitimacy. That only deepened after 1989, when hopes of political liberalization were crushed following the military suppression of the democracy demonstrations centered on Tiananmen Square in Beijing.
In 1978, “socialist China” meant “poor China” in the eyes of the West, but this was no longer the case, Xinhua said.
But the cost of living has also soared in that time, as has the income gap between the rich and poor.
In April, researchers at the University of Michigan said that China’s Gini coefficient, a measure of income distribution, stood at a high 0.55. The higher the figure, the higher the inequality, with perfect equality at 0 and total inequality at 1.
According to an excerpt from the report, “they found that the Gini coefficient for family income in China is now around 0.55 compared to 0.45 in the U.S.”
“In 1980, China’s Gini coefficient was 0.30,” it said. “In 2012, the Chinese government refused to release the country’s Gini coefficient. Generally, when the coefficient reaches 0.5, it indicates that the gap between rich and poor is severe.”
And in July, the Institute of Social Science Survey at Peking University published a report with a higher Gini figure of 0.73. In its report, the institute found that about 1 percent of families owned one-third of the country’s wealth.
