… Chinese had Bells, Gunpowder, Lodestone, Compass, and Art of Printing for many ages before Europe: But that what they are universally allowed, even at this day, to excel all other Nations in, is, The Art of Government.

Eustace Budgell, English Politician, 1731

As a leadership and strategy professor, I’ve been most impressed by how the world’s most populous nation has conducted its complex anti-poverty campaign so thoroughly and rapidly at every level from provincial to county, city, village and even household. It is a miracle of both management and motivation. No wonder the eighteenth century English politician, Eustace Budgell, wrote that China’s greatest innovation was “The Art of Government”.

Even 2,000 years ago, Emperor Han Wudi engaged in many reforms that today we consider “modern”. In attacking corruption, he removed all non-central government road tolls—as modern China did in the mid 1990s—and returned many of the sycophantic noblemen to the countryside. These idle aristocrats were furious when he replaced them by recruiting talented commoners for government positions and this meritocracy was so successful that it lasted for most of 2,000 years.

How China Influenced Western Government

China’s meritocracy-based government impressed Western governments so much that, in 1832, England adapted the imperial exam to India, and in 1846 applied it to England as the British Civil Service Exam. British nobility were as indignant as the Chinese nobility had been 2,000 years earlier. In a parliamentary debate on July 17, 1863, an indignant English nobleman complained, “The English people did not know that it was necessary for them to take lessons from the Celestial Empire [China].”Footnote 1

As it turned out, the entire world was to take lessons from China. In 2013, the BBC wrote that all “modern job recruitment” had been inspired by China’s ancient system of hiring people based on ability rather than social connections.Footnote 2

A cursory overview of China’s history reveals why Budgell was so enthralled by Old China’s “art of government”. Over 2,000 years ago, the Chinese government supported research in everything from poetry and music to agriculture and engineering. About 256 BC, Governor Li Bing transformed Sichuan into West China’s breadbasket with the Dujiangyan irrigation project, which to this day irrigates over 5,300 squ. miles of land—and without the environmental issues of modern dams. From 1916 to 2016, the U.S. destroyed 1,384 dams because they hindered the natural migration of fish, but Dujiangyan has provided irrigation and controlled flooding for 2,300 years—all without hindering the free passage of fish or ships. This is because Li Bing’s engineering marvel met many needs at once by following a wise 4,000 year-old Chinese philosophy of “divert, not dam.”

When I helped Chinese cities compete in the international competition for livable communities, one of the European judges’ favorite mantras was “joined-up thinking,” which means “thinking about a complicated problem in an intelligent way that includes all the important facts”—not in isolation but as part of a whole. That was a new concept to the West but holistic thinking has been part of Chinese philosophy, government and even medicine for thousands of years.

Ancient Scholar Bureaucrat Innovation

The scope of Chinese scholars’ research and innovation to meet the needs of China’s vast population is astounding. China used biological pesticides 2,000 years ago, and the “Dutch plow” patented in Europe in 1730 was actually invented in China 2,300 years ago. Chinese built bridges with bio-engineering 1,000 years ago. As for medicine, modern China has not had smallpox since 1952, but even 1,000 years ago, Chinese inoculated for smallpox and steamed clothes to reduce the spread of infection.

In 1856, the “Bessemer process” of modern steel making was patented in the UK but the head of China’s astronomy bureau, Shen Kuo (1031–1095) had written about this very process almost 1,000 years earlier. In addition to astronomy, Shen Kuo wrote about biological pest control, climate change and prevention of deforestation, raised relief maps, pinhole cameras, and music and math harmonics. His fields of expertise included geology, archaeology, math, pharmacology, magnetic, optics (he explained rainbows), hydraulics, metaphysics, meteorology (and UFOs!), climatology, geography, cartography, botany, zoology, architecture, agriculture, economics, military strategy, ethnography, music and divination.

Anyone who thinks China’s “rigid” Confucian imperial exams squelched scholars’ creativity have not read about scholars such as Shen Kuo, or Zhang Heng (78–139), who was a scholar, statesman, scientist, engineer, artist, poet and inventor of a seismograph that detected an earthquake 1,000 miles away. Or Su Song, who 1,000 years ago in my home of Xiamen, compiled the vast Materia Medica and invented the world’s first water-powered astronomical clock and the chain drive that was the precursor to modern mechanization.

Old China More Market-Driven Than Europe

Old China also surpassed the West in economy and trade. In the 1700s, China and India accounted for 2/3 of the global GDP, and in 2014, Harvard Business Review wrote:

The Chinese invented gunpowder, the compass, the waterwheel, paper money, long-distance banking, the civil service, and merit promotion. Until the early 19th century, China’s economy was more open and market driven than the economies of Europe.Footnote 3

No wonder seventeenth century Europeans marveled at China. It was innovative, cultured, and rich. But imagine what Budgell would think of New China, which today is not only No. 2 in GDP (USD 11 trillion—14.8% of global GDP) but also No. 1 in PPP (Purchasing Power Parity, “a measure which adjusts a country’s wealth based on what people can afford to buy.”)

The world should be grateful that China is No. 1 in PDP because it is Chinese’ newfound wealth that is driving global tourism. McKinsey forecasted that 160 million Chinese would travel abroad in 2020, and Chinese spend so much abroad (over USD 250 billion abroad in 2017) that London’s Marylebone Railway Station now makes announcements in Chinese.

“A true treasure” should never be exchanged for any other “fake treasures” that may harm the environment.

Xi Jinping, November 1, 2014

Growing and Greening

While Chinese government has been influenced by Confucian morality, Taoism helps account for the ancient emphasis on harmony with the environment (as seen 1,000 years ago with Sun Kuo’s studies of climate change, deforestation and biological pest controls). Some 2,500 years ago, Lao Zi said in the Dao De Jing (Chapter 25), “Man follows the earth, Earth follow Heaven, Heaven follows the Tao, Tao follows what is natural.”

China has faced many hurdles in attempting to balance growing and greening, but as with its war on poverty, it has done at least as well as or better than the nations that criticize it. In 2017, National Geographic noted the world had lost one third of its arable land over 40 years to erosion and degradation.Footnote 4 But since 2000, China has accounted for a quarter of the world’s greening—two fifths of it from expanding forests—even though China has only 6.3% of the world’s landmass.

When I drove around China in 2019, many of the wastelands I’d seen in 1994 in Ningxia, West Fujian and Gansu had been transformed into lush grasslands and forests, including Inner Mongolia’s “Great Green Wall” of trees in the Gobi desert. Begun in 1978 and projected to end in 2050, the project has already planted 66 billion trees.

China now invests more in green technology than any other country, has over half of global electric car sales, and has 99% of the world’s electric busses.Footnote 5

Speaking of busses—China also has the world’s best transportation network. When I drove 40,000 km around China in 1994, I averaged only 300 km a day, driving 10 to 12 h daily. Today, thanks in part to breathtakingly beautiful bridges and tunnels so long that they have electric light shows to keep drivers awake, China has the world’s most extensive highway and railway networks. This infrastructure, coupled with internet to even the remotest villages, is helping to drive rural development and innovation and lure young people to return home from cities.

China is on track to become the world’s biggest filer of patents. In 2018, China had 46% of the planet’s patent applications—some 1.5 million applications compared to 597,141Footnote 6 from the U.S. applications. China also filed for 53,345 international patents (21% of international patents), including 473 of the world’s 608 artificial intelligence patents.Footnote 7 But thanks to government programs to promote rural industry and entrepreneurship, rural Chinese are proving to be as innovative as their urban peers.

China has over 4,300 “Taobao” villages, which Alibaba defines as a village in which over 10% of households run online stores and village e-commerce revenues exceed 10 million Yuan yearly. Farmers receive training in Alibaba’s logistics and services to sell local farm products and specialties online. I saw firsthand in a remote Lisu minority village in West Yunnan and a She minority village in Northeast Fujian the extensive government services and training provided to lure young graduates back to help develop their ancestral hometown. Even remote Tibetan herdsmen buy and sell online through mobile phones.

I was astonished when I first saw a Ningxia farmer using his cell phone for e-commerce. I thought back to the early 1990s when, even in coastal Xiamen, a Special Economic Zone, I had to spend USD 450 and wait three years to get our first phone.

Prosperity Helps Fight Poverty

China’s greatest achievement, to me at least, is that it has consistently used its newfound wealth to tackle poverty. As provincial leaders explained to me, China learned early on from other nations’ examples that development alone does not necessarily benefit impoverished people. There must be programs that deliberately and strategically tackle poverty. But once China did begin to prosper, it also consistently increased the scope and efficiency of investments to tackle absolute poverty—and the results have astounded the world.

Between 1981 and 2011, global poverty dropped 50%, which is heartening, but during that same period, China’s number of poor plummeted 90% from 838 million to 84.17 million, and was less than 700,000 in 2015.Footnote 8

In 1993, He Kang, former Chinese Minister of Agriculture, received the World Food Prize:

... for implementing the reform policies that enabled China to become self-sufficient in basic food for the first time in modern history. This major accomplishment – which Minister He was able to achieve in little more than a decade – becomes all the more impressive when one considers that China, with over one billion people, has 22 percent of the world’s population yet only 7 percent of the world’s arable land.

In September, 2000, all 191 UN members signed the UN Millennium Declaration with its eight goals to achieve by 2015, number one of which was “to eradicate extreme hunger and poverty”. China was the first developing country to achieve this goal, feeding nearly 20% of the world’s population with less than 10% of the world’s cultivated land.

In 2013, Xi Jinping told a group of Miao minority villagers in Hunan’s remote Eighteen Caves Village that he thought China could end absolute poverty by 2020. It seemed an off the cuff remark, but the nation took it to heart. Only four years later, the UN secretary-general said, “China’s precision poverty alleviation is the world’s only way to help the poor and reach the goals of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development,” which aims to eliminate poverty in all forms, everywhere.

In December, 2019, the World Economic Forum noted that between 1990 and 2015, China had accounted for over three fifths of the reduction in global poverty. And today (2020), even with the 2020 deadline breathing down its neck, China continues to be confident and committed to ending absolute poverty in every corner of the country, regardless of what it takes. But why?

Why Fight Poverty?

For over 30 years, I’ve watched how China has evolved its fight against poverty, but I’ve also wondered “why” the nation should be so single-mindedly in its determination to eliminate poverty, especially since Xi Jinping became general secretary of the whole Party in 2012.

Many nations of course give lip service to fighting poverty but never has another nation made abolition of poverty the cornerstone of society, government and economy.

When I compare the sacrificial anti-poverty efforts of China, a developing nation, with the token efforts of wealthier nations that dole out money in simplistic programs that often engender greater dependency than self-sufficiency, I think of the old argument about whether the pig or the chicken contributes most to a breakfast of ham and eggs. The pig argued, “You are just involved, giving eggs that you can easily replace; but I must give my life.”

For 70 years, China has kept anti-poverty work as the core of its very existence. Even in the 1950s, Mao Zedong said that a socialist nation could not coexist with poverty, but for thousands of years before that, China’s Confucian code of ethics and morality actually mandated that government care for its people and follow the “Five Constants” of Benevolence, Righteousness, Rites, Knowledge, and Integrity. Chinese history is full of examples of rulers and entire dynasties that were overthrown after violating this “Mandate of Heaven”.

Even my own province of Fujian has outstanding examples of wise and benevolent government. Almost 1,000 years ago, Quanzhou City, ancient start of the Maritime Silk Road and Marco Polo’s port of departure from China, saved grain during good years to help feed its people during lean years or after natural disasters such as typhoons. And of course we’ve already looked at the Dujiangyan irrigation project that for 2,200 years has fed much of West China.

The Modern Mandate of Heaven

China’s leaders today, like their ancient forebears, labor under the same moral imperative to provide the people with basic food, clothing, shelter and healthcare.

Modern rulers, like the ancients who had to prove themselves by surviving the grueling imperial exam (which some Europeans called “the test from hell”), must graduate from university and then prove themselves capable before they are moved up in the ranks of leadership.

Hong Kong-Apec Trade Policy Group executive David Dodwell wrote in 2017, “The main difference between the U.S. and China is not that one is capitalist and the other communist. Rather, it’s that one is run by lawyers, and the other by engineers.”Footnote 9

Given China’s success with hi-speed trains, supercomputers, and the first landing on the dark side of the moon, it appears that China’s engineer bureaucrats are doing well.

And New China, like Old China, has strict policies to minimize corruption and inculcate within leaders a sense of moral responsibility. Again, like the ancients, modern young leaders are first sent to areas far from home and friends. Xi Jinping, for example, was sent to Xiamen, and then to Ningde, one of the 18 poorest counties in China, where the 35-year-old thought up many of the anti-poverty philosophies and practices that were later adopted throughout China. His conscientiousness and creative approach to solving poverty in Ningde led him to the governorship of Fujian Province, and then on to Shanghai and Beijing—but he had to prove himself each step of the way.

The government also works unceasingly at grilling into the minds and hearts of the populace that fighting poverty must be New China’s cornerstone. This may sound simple in theory but in practice it is not easy to get people living comfortable urban lives to really care about starving farmers living in remote mountainous or desert regions.

China’s Anti-poverty Straight from the Horse’s Mouth

China’s war on poverty is so multi-faceted, embracing 70 years of evolving philosophies, policies and practices, that my own understanding was at best patchwork—until I had the honor of flying to Beijing and interviewing Dr. Huang Chengwei, the man who had been in charge of the entire nation’s anti-poverty program.

As he shared how China’s war on poverty began, and has evolved, I slowly began to understand many of the changes I’d witnessed. I also gained a much greater respect for the sacrifices the leadership and populace had made to achieve them—from “barefoot doctors” to “barefoot first secretaries”.

But my greatest takeaway from interviewing Dr. Huang was that China has much to tell the rest of the world about eradicating an evil that should no longer exist in a world as technologically advanced as ours today.