China’s targeted poverty alleviation is the world’s only way to help the poor and reach the goals of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, 2017

I first encountered the Chinese Dream in 1976 in Taiwan when I quite literally received a sign from the heavens. Hundreds of leaflets from a mainland balloon rained upon me as I crossed a field on CCK Air Base in Taizhong. I could not read Chinese so wasn’t interested in them, but I was surprised that mainland farmers in the photos so closely resembled Taiwan farmers. When I learned that both sides of the Taiwan Straits were quite literally one family, I determined someday to see the rest of China—but it took me 10 years to get there.

After leaving Taiwan, I spent three years as an Air Force OSI agent in the U.S. and Turkey, and an assignment with the Shah of Iran in 1979 led me to question many of my assumptions of why so many developing countries remained mired in abject poverty even in a world of unprecedented prosperity. In 1981, I left the Air Force and started a master’s program in Los Angeles, where I met an American girl who had been born and raised in Taiwan and also wanted to study in China. Our mutual interest in China led to friendship, and our wedding that Christmas in Taibei (Taipei).

Over the years, as we awaited an opportunity to move to China, we often traipsed to Los Angeles’ Chinatown to buy copies of China Reconstructs (now China Today). The more I read about China’s advances in everything from industry and agriculture to health and education, the more I looked forward to seeing the changes myself, and in 1988, ten years after I’d left Taiwan, Sue and I finally moved with two small sons to Xiamen University to study Chinese.

We felt right at home in Xiamen because it was only 100 miles across the Straits from our former home of Taizhong, and both sides shared the same dialect and customs. But though we loved the place and people, living conditions were a challenge.

Today, Xiamen has received so many international honors as a modern livable city that it is hard to believe what this island city was like in 1988. We had almost daily water and power outages. Roads were narrow and potholed, and buses belched black smoke that poured up from cracks in the wooden floors. There were few stores and good items were usually sold out before we could get to them, leaving only the centrally distributed products that no one would buy. I bought a three-wheeled pedicab to help us seek staples like toothpaste and toilet paper.

It took over a month to get permission for a pedicab because they thought I’d use it for business. It was even harder to get a phone. I paid over USD 450 and waited three years for it to be installed.

Yet in spite of the challenges, Xiamen people were cheerful because living conditions were already better than any had ever experienced and they were optimistic about the future—but I was curious if rural life was also improving.

Each evening, the TV station aired a short clip urging urbanites to not waste the food that farmers labored so hard to provide. The first scene was the poor farmer toiling at dawn in a rice paddy, then it showed an urban family eating a meal of several dishes and throwing away the leftovers, and the final scene was of the tired farmer at dusk with only a plain bowl of rice for supper. It was a powerful message. I vowed to be less wasteful—but I also vowed to see for myself how farmers really lived.

Exploring the Countryside

In January, 1989, I began exploring rural Fujian by bus, boat, bicycle and farm tractor. It had been so warm in Xiamen that I left home without a jacket, clueless that we were about to be hit by a very rare cold spell. I spent the nights in dark, unheated granite homes, and was so cold that my gracious hosts, whose clothing was even thinner than mine, insisted on soaking my feet in hot water and giving me an extra blanket for the night—a thin blanket, but the best they had. I shivered the entire night, my very bones aching. By the time I rose, just before dawn, my cheerful hosts had already prepared a big breakfast. Years later I learned they’d served me, a stranger, treats they’d been saving for Chinese New Year.

Although my hosts were poor, they did not seem to know it. Like my city friends, they were cheerful and convinced things would only get better. For their sakes, I hoped so. But given that much smaller and wealthier nations had yet to end poverty, I suspected that change would take half a century, and that we were all “planting trees that future generations could enjoy the shade.”

I dropped my Chinese study after one semester to help start Xiamen University’s (XMU) new MBA program, figuring I could study Chinese on my own, and the more I learned, the more I realized that China was nothing like the country portrayed by Western media. But when I wrote articles to refute some unfair criticisms of China, indignant foreigners complained, “You should not write about things you don’t understand. You’ve only seen coastal China. Inland provinces are not changing!”

“How would you know?” I asked. “You’ve never been there!”

“Neither have you!” they replied.

They had a point. So in 1993, I bought a 15-passenger van and we drove 10,000 km around S.E. China, and in 1994 explored another 40,000 km. We averaged only 25 km/h as we spent three months driving from Fujian up the coast and over to Inner Mongolia and the Gobi Desert, west to Qinghai and Tibet, and back to Xiamen through South China. I was surprised at the massive investments on roads, electricity, healthcare and education even in the poorest corners of Ningxia, Gansu, Guizhou—places that even UNESCO officials had deemed hopeless. It was heartening from a humanitarian standpoint but as a businessman I did not see how they could justify spending a fortune on such impoverished, relatively unpopulated regions. I slowly learned that China’s leaders were very farsighted.

Give Fish or Teach to Fish

Chinese have long said, “Give a fish, feed for a day; teach to fish, feed for a lifetime.” Early on, China learned the hard way that simply doling out aid, though sometimes necessary, does not solve the root of poverty and can lead to dependency, so the nation shifted from “blood transfusion” to “blood production”—from aid to enablement. China taught the poor to fish by giving them an improved environment that fostered self-sufficiency so they could lift themselves from poverty. This approach showed that the government had tremendous faith in the people’s ability and motivation to seize new opportunities—and it paid off because Chinese people today are as industrious as their ancestors.

Rose Talman, a Xiamen missionary from 1916 to 1930, wrote in her unpublished memoirs of the Chinese love for peace, and their “will to love and fight against poverty”:

To their conditions they have developed responses – frugality (nothing wasted in China), patience, industriousness, sense of humour – a philosophical approach to the realities of life. These are the qualities that make the Chinese tough and persevering and give them the will to love and fight against poverty. The Chinese enjoy few luxuries in material things. They are not an acquisitive society. The people yearn more for peace and stability – a climate for work rather than affluence or wealth for the sake of pleasure. There is a great difference in the psychology of Eastern and Western society.

Over the years, I’ve collected hundreds of books and documents written by foreigners in China over the past few centuries, and they uniformly admired and respected both China’s system of governance and the people’s enterprising spirit—and that spirit is just as evident today.

South Fujian is famous for China’s best tea, but in the early 1990s, my tea farming friends were so poor that they could not afford to drink their own tea, brewing weeds and herbs instead. Yet whenever I made the several hours drive to visit them, navigating torturous dirt roads snaking through mountains, they served me the best tea they had. Only years later did I understand their sacrifice. Today, concrete roads lead to villagers’ very doorsteps and they drink tea whenever they want it. They also now use electricity instead of kerosene and candles, and spend evenings watching a wall-mounted flat screen TV bigger than my own (they were watching American Idol the last time I visited; hopefully they’ll progress beyond that).

China has had exceptional, visionary top-down policies but they have been successful only because of the bottom-up industriousness and ingenuity of people like my friend Madame Yang Ying. As a farm girl with only four years of schooling, her dream in 1981 was to earn 20 Yuan a month as a Xiamen University professor’s maid—10 Yuan to keep and 10 Yuan to send home. She achieved that dream, then sold fish, cornered Xiamen’s market on pork, opened a rural credit union, invested in real estate, and today has several international schools, a biotechnology company, a bone-marrow bank for leukemia patients and is helping to build 1,000 Hope schools for less advantaged children. She also supports every retiree in her hometown.

Mr. Lin Zhengjia, another country kid with only four years of education, did not own shoes until he was a teen, but today he is a leading tunnel expert, documentary maker and philanthropist pouring millions into education and cultural exchange programs.

And tomorrow’s leaders are being prepared and empowered today by teachers like Dr. Hu Min, a country kid who would have been expelled from school had it not been for one teacher who urged he be given one last chance. Hu Min was so moved that he buckled down, tested into college at 15, taught in a university until he was 30, and today is CEO and founder of New Channel Education Group, the “Father of IELTS”, has published over 300 books and audio-visual materials for his more than 100,000 students around the country, and stresses students’ “global competencies” to prepare them for China’s growing international role.

Most impressive to me is that, in both Old and New China, most of those whom I have met who rose from rags to riches give generously to help those still in rags. They are capitalists in business, but at heart they exemplify the socialist spirit which says “no society is prosperous if any remain in poverty.”

20,000 Km in 32 Days

As I met people like Madame Yang Ying over the years and read about the changes, I yearned to drive around China a second time to see the changes since 1994, and that opportunity dropped in my lap in the summer of 2019.

The Party secretary of our Xiamen University School of Management said to me, “This is the 25th anniversary of your 1994 drive! You should tour China again!” He saw my hesitation and added, “We’ll cover all expenses!”

I agreed, but then he insisted I have a driver. “You’re 63 now, not 36!” he said, as if I’d forgotten. “It’s too long and dangerous.”

It wasn’t a bad idea. I could write while he drove. But we ended up with three cars and a dozen people, including spare drivers, a medical doctor to keep their aging foreign teacher from falling apart, student assistants and Miss Wang from New Channel Education Group, whom CEO Hu Min sent to help transcribe oral interviews.

In 1994, the 40,000 km drive took three months driving 10 h a day, but in 2019 the 20,000 km trip took only 32 days—and my Chinese colleagues were as astounded as I was by the changes.

In 1994, I had nicknamed Inner Mongolia as “Mudgolia” because the province seemed to have but one color: mud. But in 2019, on the edge of the Gobi Desert, I looked in vain for the barren wasteland where my van had been trapped in 1994. Today, it has a beautiful divided highway with grass and trees on both sides and down the middle.

In 1994, even mountainous stretches of Guangdong, the rich province bordering Hong Kong, had only dirt roads. Today, China has the world’s largest hi-speed railway and highway networks, and concrete roads to remote villages rebuilt with government-subsidized homes, many of them with nice architectural flourishes to reflect minorities’ heritage.

China also has the world’s largest online community and a booming rural e-commerce business with over 4,000 “Taobao Villages” (villages earning at least 10 million Yuan yearly from e-commerce).

All nations struggle with urbanization, with over half of the world now in cities, but in China, many are returning from cities to seek their fortune in their hometowns thanks to improved living conditions and government training, support and subsidies for rural entrepreneurs. But such precision poverty alleviation, from national to village and even household level, has been possible only because of the dedication and sacrifices of China’s First Party Secretaries.

Barefoot First Party Secretaries

Even with the world’s most successful national and regional poverty alleviation programs, the leadership realized it still lacked direct contact with the poorest people. Xi Jinping proposed reaching these people by the creation of First Party Secretaries as a core strategy.Footnote 1 Between 2015 and 2019, China selected some 459,000 talented and dedicated people to serve poverty-stricken villages.

I have met many of these courageous and compassionate leaders, and nicknamed them “barefoot first secretaries” because they willingly left families and careers for three or more years and, like early barefoot doctors, live with those whom they serve in China’s poorest villages. I marveled at how they creatively tackled problems ranging from poor infrastructure, healthcare and education to the creation of sustainable green industry. Above all, their example has helped shift attitudes from dependency to self-reliance, innovativeness and entrepreneurialism—or as Chinese put it, from blood transfusion to blood production.

In spite of their challenging living conditions, I did not meet even one who regretted the sacrifices, and several had volunteered for a second three-year stint in spite of family or health challenges. It is no wonder that several farmers in different provinces told me, “We have good policies now because the government understands us and cares for us.”

But several farmers added, “Good policies aren’t enough; we must also do our part.”

In December, 2019, the World Economic Forum noted that between 1990 and 2015, China had accounted for over 3/5 of reduction in global poverty, yet in spite of China’s lead, the rest of the world has not kept on track. The World Bank projects that half a billion people will still live in extreme poverty in 2030.Footnote 2

My hope is that the rest of the world can learn from China’s experiences because all people are dreamers. We all dream of a better life of peace and prosperity for our families and descendants. But for the first time in recorded history, we have an example of how to make this dream a reality. And not only do each of us have a part to play but, and this is important—there are no small parts.

If we each do our part, even a miracle like the Chinese Dream can be achieved. But only if, as T. E. Lawrence wrote in 1922, we dream by day with eyes wide open.

All men dream, but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds, wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act on their dreams with open eyes, to make them possible.

T. E. Lawrence, “Seven Pillars of Wisdom”, 1922