China Sessions Part II: Alleviating poverty – lessons to be learnt

I think China clearly demonstrates that economic growth, and in particular the kind of economic growth that China was able to generate, is the key contributor to poverty-reduction in the first three decades. (File pic shows Shanghai skyline)

I FIRST visited China in 1974 during the disruptive cultural revolution. What I saw then, especially in rural China (incidence of rural poverty, I was told, being 99%) really made me appreciate the good life – even as we knew it then – we already had in Malaysia. Not unlike the rest of the world, ending absolute poverty has been a China dream for centuries.

When Mao Zedong declared in Beijing’s Tiananmen the birth of the New China in 1949, a Herculean task stood before him and the Communist Party of China (CPC) that he led: feeding and clothing 540 million Chinese people, nearly 90% of whom lived in rural areas. Deng Xiaoping, the visionary chief architect of China’s reform and opening-up which began in 1978, made it China’s priority to eradicate extreme poverty.