The world was offered a lesson in how to lift hundreds of millions of people out of poverty at an international conference in Shanghai last week, posing a powerful alternative to Western development models. Presidents and heads of international institutions paid homage to China’s successes.
The scale and speed of the country’s economic expansion is unprecedented. Since opening its economy in 1978, it has accounted for three-quarters of all the people in the world lifted out of abject poverty.
According to the World Bank, the number of Chinese people subsisting on less than $1 a day has fallen from 490-million in 1981 to 88-million — or from 49% of the population to 6,9%. During this period, the country’s output has grown more than eightfold and the average income by 7% a year, exceeding $1 000 for the first time last year.
China’s poverty line is, however, defined as $75 a year, compared with the $1 a day of the World Bank. More than 62% of the 1,3-billion population live in poor, rural areas. Average life expectancy has increased from 35 years in 1949 to 71,4 years now.
The country is now the world’s fourth-biggest trading nation and the main drawcard for foreign investment. Its gross domestic product has increased from $362,4-billion to $11,9-trillion since 1979 and is expected to double again in the next 10 years. It grew last year at 9,1%.
”This will go down as one of the most remarkable feats in human history,” said Prime Minister Wen Jiabao. ”We are here to establish a new economic and political order.”
To underline China’s growing international clout, he announced a $20-million fund to tackle poverty in Asia, heralding a new role for a country that has been a significant aid recipient for much of the past 30 years.
But the main aim of the 800 delegates — including the presidents of Brazil, Tanzania and Bangladesh — was to share poverty alleviation experiences so that small, successful models of development can be adapted and used on a larger scale elsewhere. It is a long way from the rigid one-formula-fits-all approach of the Washington Consensus on open markets — fiscal stringency and privatisation — often criticised as an attempt by Western policymakers to impose economic dogmas on the developing world.
World Bank president James Wolfensohn found himself in the unusual position of praising the Communist Party’s five-year economic plans.
”The Washington Consensus has been dead for years,” he said. ”Today there is no consensus. We are not here to teach doctrines but to exchange ideas.”
China’s model is not easy to emulate. It has opened its door to investment and trade gradually since 1978, privatisation has come in stages, and the government has controlled the financial system to enable companies to borrow huge sums for investment.
These have driven the rapid growth along the eastern seaboard, which has created a huge disparity with the impoverished interior. In the forests of Yunnan, mountains of Tibet and deserts of Inner Mongolia, millions still lack adequate food and water.
To counter this unbalanced development, seen as a threat to social stability, the government has spent billions on a ”go west” policy to build infrastructure inland. Wealthy cities like Shanghai have been instructed to form partnerships with poorer areas, which benefit from business links and bridge, dam, road, airport and housing projects under way everywhere.
Migration rules have been eased to allow the poor to travel to find work; the floating population of labourers is now estimated at more than 100-million. The government plans to move 300-million people out of the country and into the cities by 2020.
International donors report a growing willingness among the Chinese to learn from overseas experiences. Pilot schemes — such as British-funded HIV/Aids awareness programmes in Yunnan and education projects in Gansu — have been adapted and applied by the government at a national level. Many poverty alleviation schemes are possible only because of China’s authoritarian political system.
The one-child policy, condemned internationally as an infringement of human rights, has checked population growth and the strain on resources. Schemes to raise the living standards of minority groups sometimes involve forced resettlement from traditional rural homes to suburban housing estates.
But although the human rights debate continues, foreign governments are willing to acknowledge that China has much to teach, as well as to learn. — Â