China Lifts 300 Million out of World Poverty

The World Food Program (WFP) has issues a press release announcing an alliance with China. That itself would not motivate post on the topic, but it was the second paragraph that knocked me on my heels:

"Having lifted 300 million of its own people out of poverty in less than a generation - surely one of the greatest achievements of the 20th century - China has now pledged to commit more of its considerable resources to helping us help those in desperate need elsewhere," James Morris, Executive Director of the United Nations World Food Programme, said in Beijing."

Elevating 300 million people out of poverty is a  stupendous and positive achievement. That's a number almost as large as the US population and represents one in every four citizens of this country of 1.4 billion people.

The more I know about China, the less I understand about China. It is simultaneously, a modern, emerging and feudal place. While outsiders get snapshots and draw conclusions, we often do not understand the complexity of a situation. We see Tianemen, Tibet and jailed bloggers and we become horrified or at least indignant and rightfully so. These are ugly snapshots, but stack them up and they do not reveal even a fraction of the overall picture.

I tend to feel people should form the country they want under the government they want and so I side with Tibet. I greatly admire the Dalai Lama and so I sympathize with a free Tibet. I really know nothing about China's historic claim or why the world turned it's back 50 years ago. I suspect that ignorance is shared by several hundred million Chinese.

From my view, the wart on China's image is not China. It is one wart.  I approve of Tibet's proponents showing non violent, dissent to draw attention and sympathy to their cause. But to deprive China of this moment of greatness, when the athlete of the world compete in a most peaceful of venues in a place that struggles with labyrinthine issues of rapid emergence to me would be a shame.

At this time and in this world, it seems to me that China is to be commended for allowing 300 million people to put food on their plates, even by those who loathe their behavior in Tibet. I don't for sure, but if I understand the teaching of the Dalai Lama, I think he would agree.

[NOTE: Several hours after posting this, my frind Isaac Mao in China tweeted me to say that this news has not yet been released in China. Very puzzling.]

Comments

[/pd]

searched the press packs of WPF- not seeing the press release. Any chance to a link ?

[shel israel]

Sorry Pete, I have put the link back in.

[/pd]

thanks Shel - mucho gracis !!

[David Parmet]

The Nazi's pulled a lot of German's out of the grinding poverty of post-WWI Europe. So what's the point? Is it better to have a full belly in a repressive regime than to go hungry in any case?

The warts on China are far greater than just Tibet. There's the brutal crackdown against Muslims in Xinjiang provence. The Chinese gov't is using the excuse of "the war on terror" to jail and brutalize the ethnic Uighurs in a province rich with oil and other natural resources. Here are some details - http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/asia/china/article2116123.ece

[shel israel]

David, On one hand you make an excellent point. There are many warts on China's face. But to liken them to the Nazis, with their extermination camps, invasion of a score of countries, and arbitrary street level executions is excessive in my opinion and distorts the case. I also think you sell short the lifting of 300million residents of the world from starvation.

[David Parmet]

Shel - ask the millions of peasants who died in Mao's economic experiments. Ask the millions more who are suffering under the present regime's brutal efforts to maintain its power and control.

You don't get to pick and choose better or worse repression and genocide. What the Chinese are doing in Tibet and Xinjiang is ethnic cleansing at its most basic. Similarly the Sudanese government is practicing ethnic cleansing and genocide of its own ethnic minorities with assistance and weapons from ... you guessed it, China.

If I'm selling short the lifting of 300 million people from poverty Shel, you are selling short the brutal, repressive regime they live under.

[Prokofy Neva]

Shel,

This is absolutely tasteless and misleading at a time when Tibetan demonstrators are getting beaten -- it's as if you are trying to distract from the authentic narrative that people are trying to tell from Tibet, and the solidarity people are showing them, to this other very communist-style propagandistic shtick. Why are you doing this?!

Surely you know that China can claim to "lift people out of poverty" because...it killed, jailed, or re-educated a lot of them in the Cultural Revolution and beyond.

There isn't any stupendous achievement here, Shel. You don't say about the United States at the turn of the century, when it faced massive immigration and poverty, that "the US government lifted millions out of poverty" because what you do in a free society is you create the conditions for people to lift themselves out of poverty. You also create the structures of conscience that people can help one another -- but you don't perceive the entire issue as one where a government has to clothe and feed everybody -- when you do that, they wind up starving and unshod.

I'm baffled why China deserves any "moment of greatness". The entire Olympic thing is a propaganda stunt as it was for the Soviet Union in 1980.

You're also viewing the problem of human rights in China only as a Tibetan issue -- when there are many, many more issues besides the ethnic and power-sharing issues, issues of basic human rights that you yourself enjoy.

What's awful about your notion of "lifting from poverty" is that you are setting up this false appositive between "economic and social rights" and "civil and political rights". These are always best integrated and interdependent. You can't have one set without the other. The peasants wouldn't starve if it weren't for terribly policies of centralization, control, exploitation. Once those conditions exist, yes, the WHO and UN and government have to step in to try to advance the country -- but you don't have to achieve freedom from want by stepping on all the other freedoms -- it has never worked anywhere, and doesn't work in China.

You had also better look far more carefully at what China does when it "helps others elsewhere in the world". For example, China's support of the Government of Sudan and its exploitative gas pipeline activity in Sudan isn't helping, it's hurting.

Your desire to save face for China goes so deep, Shel. Why? Why can't you accept that it is far more complex than you wish, and stop trying to influence everyone to become pro-Chinese? There's no objective need for this.

[Prokofy Neva]

Actually, it's fair to compare them, and even fair to find them worse -- a position that can enrage people who always need to find something "good" about communism as a "good idea that went wrong" -- but it's a position that can be taken without finding anything less evil about Nazism, surely.

Like Soviet communism, the numbers of victims are not only comparable -- there are many millions more, over a longer period of time, and the effects are longer-lasting because there is no defeat from an outside power, and no trial like Nuremberg and no recognition by the liberal intelligentsia like yourself that it *was as bad, if not worse*. Imagine trying to live with that problem.

The reason we know the Nazis were as horrible as they were is because they were defeated, and the outside powers came in and could document the horror. The Soviets and Red Chinese were *not* defeated, stayed in power, and covered up the truth. The horrors of Chinese gulags are as bad as those of Nazi and Soviet camps -- why somehow attempt to diminish them? There is no objective need for this, as the Holocaust is a fully recognized horror, and there is no diminishing of it by saying that sadly, many other massive, massive horrors happen in the world then and now, whether in Sudan, DRC, Cambodia, China, the Soviet Union.

There was plenty of street-level execution in China. I think you need to do a LOT more reading about the Cultural Revolution and the years of Mao. As for invasions of other countries, well, that's what Tibet is all about. If China and the Soviet Union did all their invading and annexing in the previous centuries and are large powers by the time of World War II that have no need to keep invading, how does that somehow "improve them"? Their invading and annexation is merely finished.

[Social Network Web Design]

Though the Chinese may have lifted 300 million of their population out of poverty, they continue to put out lots of businesses by manufacturing almost all kinds of goods and selling them at low prices. Lots of business have closed down because many people choose to buy goods made in China even if the quality is not so good. This resulted to companies cutting down on the number of their employees causing lots of unemployment problems in other countries.

[Michael Tangeman]

Shel, often find my head bobbing up and down in agreement when i read your posts, but this time it's au contraire.

"China" should not be credited with "lifting 300 million" out of poverty because China is a 19th century fiction, much as all nations as we know them began -- it's a concept and an image of unity and homogeneity that is promoted for internal and external consumption.

The people(s) of China deserve the credit for lifting themselves out of poverty through their incredible ingenuity and entrepreneurial spirit, only unleashed once the government of China decided to give them the economic freedoms that are rightfully theirs.

The Chinese government should be lauded when it provides freedoms to the people(s)it governs, and condemned when it fails to do so. I think we agree there.

But, that people who live in China are able to work, invest and build themselves out of poverty should be taken as a given, not as evidence of the Chinese government's magnanimity or wisdom. I think we have to be careful to give credit where credit is due here -- and all credit goes to the people(s) of China for having risen through hard work and creativity above the poverty that a previous lack of freedom helped to impose upon them.

[shel israel]

Michael, You raise an excellent point. I'm not comfortable in this position of defending a government I don't much like. I'm just happy, that in this current mess of a world 300 million people less go to bed hungry most nights. This was not my most clearly thought-out post.

[Michael Tangeman]

Yes, and I guess the alternative, that the Chinese government would have chosen not to loosen restrictions on economic freedoms (a la North Korea, for example), is something that nobody in their right mind would prefer to the current state of affairs, as imperfect as it is. Hopefully, freedoms will be extended further in China and the Tibetans will benefit, maybe even as a result of some of the current protest.

[shel israel]

In fact, I think the protest is doing precisely that. China is defending it's position to foreign press for the first time in history. It is losing face in the global eye, and world awareness of the Tibetan situation has never been higher.

[Andrew Eglinton]

The reason why we are seeing such volatile protests against the Chinese government is partly to do with global concern for the plight of oppressed Tibetan and Chinese people, but perhaps more truthfully it's a reaction of collective fear to the very fact that China has been able to lift 300 million people out of poverty - a reaction to power.

Most people realise that on its current economic trajectory, China is set to lead the world within our life times and that presents all sorts of geo-political, cultural and racial tensions in the world some of which are just beginning to surface. But there's much more to come.

Right now, the Olympic games are being engineered as a showcase of Chinese power, but truthfully the current world powers are not ready to accept this reality, they would much rather look away for now or put on a pair of tinted glasses to avoid the glare.

Whilst governments grapple with this geo-political tectonic corporations are cashing in.

Part of me wishes we still lived in an age where idealism had an impact, where equality and altruism came before competition and greed, but the reality is different. We are global capitalists, eveything is a commodity, eveything has a price, even the lives of those being held in detention camps from China to Guantanamo.

[Jenna]

Interesting article. I wrote about this in my class' blog. My dad has lived in China for years and I've been following the Chinese new for years now. I've been a bit nervous about the Olympics since my dad works for Nike and the demonstrations. Hopefully a peaceful outcome will come forward. I personally believe, more positive things can come from the Olympics, from transparency, infrastructure and economics than bad.

[Ben Tremblay]

I don't think I'm the only one who has "global gulag" in his personal vernacular.

It first came to mind years before I happened onto the phrase, when I imagined my '68 hippie bus cohort carrying through with their life trajectories and teaching such as feng shui and aromatherapy to the commandante's staff in a concentration camp.

It's antique to think that working slaves to death is smart. Cost/benefit dictates that slaves be given enough to live productive lives and to procreate.

It's a lousy time to be naive.

*blink*