For more than two decades [1990-2015] China served as the most potent anti-poverty weapon the world has ever known…. Of every five people in the world who escaped poverty during this span – a total of roughly 1.1 billion people – three were Chinese.

World Economic Forum, February 3, 2016

It’s hard to find an article about China’s poverty alleviation that doesn’t have Dr. Huang Chengwei as author, co-author or consultant. But that’s not surprising, given he is the former director of the National Poverty Alleviation and Education Center of the State Council Poverty Alleviation Office.

I’ve read several of Dr. Huang’s papers but it wasn’t until I interviewed him in his Beijing office that I fully grasped the sheer magnitude and complexity of China’s war on poverty—and why the world has so much to learn from China.

Dr. Huang was born in 1965 in Lingshan County, in S.E. Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, and judging from his accomplishments, I don’t think he has slept since he was born. Dr Huang helped research and develop China’s national poverty alleviation policies, including Xi Jinping’s precision poverty alleviation strategy. As if that wasn’t enough, he is also a part-time professor and PhD tutor at Wuhan University and Huazhong Normal University, visiting professor for the Chinese Academy of Management Science, part-time professor at several other universities, and chair of some 50 research studies, including many supported by the National Social Science Fund.

In his free time, Dr. Huang has published over 100 papers in journals, authored or co-authored 25 books, and won awards while working as chief editor of 45 publications related to poverty reduction and development. He has also served as the leader of teams in the World Bank, United Nations Development Program, United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, the Asian Development Bank, Australian Development Agency, Department for Overseas Development of the United Kingdom, Hong Kong Oxfam, International Action Assistance, etc.

On top of all of that, he is constantly fielding demands from the media, universities and government for lectures and interviews, so I felt somewhat guilty for also taking his time, but I took it anyway, because no one understands China’s fight against poverty better than Dr. Huang—with the exception, perhaps, of Xi Jinping, who has tackled poverty since he was sent to the countryside as a teen.

People-First Leadership

Dr. Huang had adjusted his busy schedule to fit me in but when he entered the room, he was relaxed and affable, and acted as if he had all the time in the world. This attitude of Chinese leaders has impressed me since I moved to Xiamen in 1988. The first time I called unexpectedly on our dean at his home, he set aside his work and served tea and oranges. In 1988, oranges were for holidays and tea was a treat; even our famous Anxi tea farmers were so poor they could not afford to drink their own tea and brewed herbs or weeds instead. But our Dean, Dr. Ping, was the epitome of a gracious Chinese host, serving the best he had, and we chatter for two hours. Only the next day did I learn from his secretary that he had stayed up until 4 am to finish the work I’d interrupted.

I’ve taught leadership in China for 32 years but have not yet mastered this “people first” leadership trait. And as Dr. Huang explained, it is this ancient “people first” mentality that has been the bedrock for China’s 70-year fight against poverty.

Dr. Huang’s schedule was tight so I expected terse, simple answers to my questions, but he replied with precise and thorough answers, ticking off policies and practices with topics and subtopics. No wonder so many grad students seek him out as a PhD advisor.

The way Dr. Huang answered every question with facts and figures reminded me of former Premier Wen Jiabao, whom I’d met in a few Beijing meetings. A European reporter once said that Premier Wen’s head had “a computer, not a brain”. After meeting leaders like Wen Jiabao, Director Huang, and even Xi Jinping a couple of times when he was still in Fujian, I can see why Dodwell wrote in 2017 that the biggest difference between China and the U.S. is that the U.S. is run by lawyers and China by engineers (just like old China that was run by engineers).

Poverty Amidst Plenty Is Immoral

“So when did China first start fighting poverty?” I asked him.

“I’d like to answer this question in three parts,” Dr. Huang said, settling back in his chair like a professor with his student.

“First, the background of China’s rural poverty alleviation strategy and how it has persisted and evolved over 70 years. Second, why we target rural areas. And third, the main problems overcome at each stage.”

“Poverty alleviation began on the very eve of New China in 1949,” Dr. Huang said, “because from day one the Party’s primary task has been to serve and meet the needs of the people – especially the poorest people. But practices have evolved with advances in knowledge and economy.”

Dr. Huang explained that the Party has had both ideological and pragmatic needs for fighting poverty. Ideologically, poverty amidst plenty is immoral. But pragmatically, it had to meet the needs of its greatest constituency—which was poor farmers. So like any political party, “the Communist Party knew it could ensure the stability of its power only by giving people a better life. In 1956, Mao Zedong warned that a nation without prosperity for all was not truly a socialist nation; socialism, by its nature, dictates the elimination of poverty.”

As many developing nations have discovered, so-called “trickle-down economics” does not work, so China has fought poverty from day one by keeping government people-centered. “If people are not the center, the focus is poverty reduction through national development with the expectation that poor areas will keep up,” Dr. Huang explained, “but according to our experience, this is impossible.”

For 70 years, poverty reduction has been the core, not an afterthought or by-product, of every stage of development. “Fighting poverty,” Dr. Huang said, “has always been the core work of the whole Party, the whole country, the whole society. Everyone is concerned about developing the poor areas.”

Survival First

Not surprisingly, anti-poverty measures had to evolve over the decades from good-intentioned but naïvely simplistic aid, which fostered dependency, to a more sustainable enablement approach that inculcated self-sufficiency. “From 1949 to 1978, China used a planned economy as a broad-based poverty reduction strategy,” Dr. Huang explained. “In 1952, China tackled peasant’s landlessness with land reform and the commune system’s public ownership of rural property, but leaders gradually realized this hurt peasants’ work motivation and was extremely inefficient.”

With rural China so extremely backward in every measure, they were forced to initially focus on guaranteeing basic survival rights—food, clothing, basic medical care, etc.—as well as industrialization of the nation, but the situation deteriorated further because of the famines of the 1950s and 1960s, and an over reliance on top-down relief-type poverty reduction (transfusion-type). “Relief-type poverty alleviation met the needs of the extremely poor,” Dr. Huang said, “but failed to develop their abilities or fix the fundamental causes of poverty, which only exacerbated their dependency. Relief rescued the starving, but not the poor.”

In spite of setbacks and missteps, China’s economy slowly gained momentum, and the nation shifted its focus to raising rural productivity through national development of infrastructure, improved irrigation, establishment of a rural science and technology service network, rural cooperative credit system and rapid development of rural basic education.

World’s First Universal Healthcare

China also created the planet’s first universal healthcare system with their famous army of 1.5 million “barefoot doctors”. This program was so innovative and effective that in 1974 the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare printed an English version of the Hunan’s Barefoot Doctor’s Manual. To this day, the barefoot doctor program is held up as a model for developing nations to assure basic medical care for the poor.

But barefoot doctors were neither barefoot nor doctors. They were peasants who received 3–6 months of intensive training in both Chinese and Western medicine to enable them to give basic first aid and treat a couple hundred of common ailments, the emphasize being prevention over cure—which has been China’s focus for millennia; in Old China, doctors were paid to keep patients healthy. But as medical volunteers in poor regions around the world have found, simple first aid can often spell the difference between life and death—or a lifetime of blindness or lameness.

These health workers were said to be barefoot because they endured the same communal living conditions and received the same remuneration as the farmers, who often did work the fields barefoot. But living and working side by side with their patients gave barefoot doctors an intimate familiarity with both the environment and their patients’ unique needs. A 2008 World Health Organization report titled “China’s Village Doctors Take Great Strides”, told the story of former barefoot doctor Liu Yuzhong:

Another of the barefoot brigade, Dr. Liu Yuzhong, still offers basic healthcare to his fellow villagers after 43 years’ service. Now 69, he is known by patients as a caring, skillful doctor, though he says, “I learned something of everything, but specialized in nothing.” He adds: “There are great advantages to having a barefoot doctor in the village. The patients are all my neighbors. I know each family’s situation, lifestyle and habits. Since I see my patients very often, even if I cannot diagnose precisely the first time, I can follow up closely and give a better diagnosis the next time.

It is no wonder China revered its barefoot doctors, some of whom went on to advanced medical studies in China and abroad. Dr. Liu Xingzhu, today the program director of the U.S. National Institute of Health’s Fogarty International Center, was himself a barefoot doctor from 1975–1977. He remembers being given only a bag of basic medicines with two syringes and ten needlesFootnote 1—but it saved peoples’ lives, and set him on a lifelong career in medicine.

While China’s medical feats were impressive, its economic growth was lackluster. From 1950 to 1973, China’s economy had been dominated by state ownership and central planning and averaged only 2.9% per year growth. China had implemented a basic rural social security system with “five guarantees”—adequate food, clothing, medical care, housing and funeral expenses, as well as relief for the extremely poor, yet by 1978, a quarter of China’s 956 million people were still under the poverty line.Footnote 2 The nation needed a fundamentally new approach—hence reform and opening up and “market socialism”—a uniquely Chinese approach to socialism.

Reform and Opening up

In the late 1970s, Deng Xiaoping spearheaded rural reform with new policies to promote production and development. The “people’s communes” in the countryside were dismantled, China opened to foreign investment and Chinese entrepreneurs were encouraged to go into business. “Some will get rich first,” Deng Xiaoping famously said, trusting that those who prospered first would help lift the rest into common prosperity.

From 1978 to 1985, China redoubled its attack on poverty by reforming the rural economic system, including rural land, market and employment systems, and increasing agricultural product prices. Per capita output rose dramatically and farmers’ per capita net income rose from 133.6 Yuan in 1978 to 397 Yuan in 1985. The number of rural poor plummeted 50% from 250 million to 125 million—but no one celebrated yet because 125 million was still over half of the entire U.S. population at that time.

The government gradually realized that much of the most intractable poverty was due to natural, geographic, historic and cultural factors such as the language barriers that hindered some minorities from obtaining education and better jobs. In 1982, China began a series of national, large-scale poverty alleviation efforts with the “Sanxi Program” in poor regions of Gansu and Ningxia, and in 1984 began improving its rural education network and introduced an innovative system of using “labor for relief” for social engineering projects. Much like the U.S.’s CCC (Civilian Conservation Corps) during the Great Depression, this project provided jobs while improving the rural infrastructure that had been one of the biggest obstacles to effective poverty alleviation.

Fine-Tuning Poverty Alleviation

In 1986, China took anti-poverty measures to a new level by establishing the Leading Group of Poverty Alleviation and Development Under the State Council (central government) to standardize and institutionalize rural poverty alleviation and development. This group identified poor counties, set a national poverty line, and created special funds for poverty alleviation, with a key priority being food and clothing for the poorest of the poor.

In spite of ambitious efforts like the Sanxi Program, the disparity between coastal and interior development became even greater, so from 1986 to 1993 the government fine-tuned its focus. Although this regional focus did benefit county economies, it lacked direct contact with poor farmers. This shortcoming, coupled with a slowdown of rural economic growth and the extremely complex challenges facing the remaining poor, led to an increase of 7 million in absolute poverty between 1985 and 1989 according to World Bank estimates. In response, then President Jiang Zemin and his successor Hu Jintao again reemphasized the Party’s fundamental belief that, “The minimum requirement for common prosperity is to solve the problem of poverty.”

China finally remedied the problem of direct contact with the poor in March, 1994, with inauguration of its national 80-7 Poverty Alleviation Plan. This ambitious plan mandated meeting 80 million people’s basic needs of food and clothing within only seven years, but this time the leadership zeroed in on the household level to ensure stable conditions for each poor family’s subsistence. At the same time, the Party made its efforts more sustainable by shifting from “relief poverty” (blood transfusion) to “development-driven poverty alleviation” (blood production)—from aid to enablement. As ancient Chinese said, “Give a fish, feed for a day; teach to fish, feed for a lifetime.”

From 1995 to 1999, the funds for poverty alleviation loans, work subsidies and development funds increased 1.63 times. And even as individual poor households were targeted from the bottom, the nation also worked from the top down on macroeconomic policies that accelerated economic development in the central and western regions. This juggling of bottom up and top down strategies was incredibly complex, yet even as I drove around China’s most remote regions in the summer of 1994, only months after the 80-7 Plan had been put into effect, I could already see the effects of this marriage of macro policies and targeted household poverty reduction.

The humanitarian aspect impressed me but not the economics. How on earth, I wondered, could China justify investing hundreds of millions in extremely poor, sparsely populated regions like Ningxia or northwest Tibet? Years later, as I began to appreciate China’s farsighted vision, I was reminded of Sony founder Akio Morita’s 1989 book The Japan That Can Say No, which had a section entitled, “America Looks 10 min Ahead; Japan Looks 10 Years.”

Chinese, I’ve learned, look ahead centuries.

Thanks to measures such as minimum living assistance, technology poverty alleviation, labor transfer, and ecological migration, poor farmers’ per capita net income tripled from 483.7 Yuan in 1993 to 1,321 Yuan in 2,000 and the number of rural absolute poor plummeted from 80 million to 32 million. The Chinese government proudly announced that it had met the basic goals of the 80-7 Poverty Alleviation Plan—food and clothing for China’s rural poor. Yet even as China celebrated, the leadership recognized that the last bastions of poverty would be the hardest to defeat.

Whole Village Promotion, Two Wheel Drive

In 2001, China targeted 94 million people in 592 poor counties and 150,000 poor villages for its “whole village promotion” and “two-wheel drive” (linking poverty alleviation with development) poverty reduction strategies. By 2010, the three-pronged focus on village advancement, industrial development and labor transfer had paid off and farmers’ income in key counties had almost doubled to 3,273 Yuan—yet again faster growth than the national average. But in response to international standard and domestic development needs, China adjusted its “poverty line”, which raised the official number of poor from 28.88 million to 43 million.

From 2011 to 2020, farmers’ incomes continued to rise faster than the national average, yet the number of “poor” increased yet again when China again raised the rural poverty line by 92% to 2,300 Yuan per capita net income. Yet regardless of the poverty line issue, it was obvious that China had solved the problem of food and clothing for the vast majority of the poor and strengthened the national economy by narrowing the gap between urban and rural areas so well that many started moving back to the countryside.

Garden City, Garden Villages

Over half of the world now lives in cities, and urbanization has plagued China as well, but thanks to improved rural infrastructure and natural environments, urbanization in China has slowed and, in some cases, even reversed.

Twenty years ago, China boasted many “Garden Cities”; today, we’re seeing more and more “Garden Villages”. In Hunan, Yang Chaowen, a young Miao minority entrepreneur, said, “When we worked in the big city, we were envious of the high-rise buildings and parks… Although we cannot build high-rise buildings, our village is much prettier than the city. We just had to build it ourselves!”

His village is now like a garden—both beautiful and prosperous. A young Miao girl in Mr. Yang’s village said, “There’s no place like home—especially if prosperous.”

As Dr. Huang noted, youth don’t dare return to their ancestral homes unless they can afford to live there, so China has developed financial policies, subsidies and training programs to promote rural entrepreneurship—especially e-commerce, which is made possible across China thanks to nationwide internet coverage and the planet’s best highway and high-speed train networks. When I drove around China in 2019, I saw fleets of delivery trucks even in remote Tibet.

4,300+ Taobao Villages

China’s youth are especially excited about the 4,300+ “Taobao villages” in 25 provinces. In 2018, these villages’ 660,000 online shops generated 195 billion Yuan in rural e-commerce sales—up 30.4% from 2017 and outpacing e-commerce’s 24% overall growth.Footnote 3 The Taobao village model benefits about half of the rural population, often creating a “virtuous circle” where growth in rural production in turn drives consumption.

Decades of fine-tuning its numerous programs has slowly led to success in fighting poverty, but no one expected the seismological shifts in policy and practice that would follow Xi Jinping’s rise to power in 2012, and his announcement that China would use “precision poverty alleviation” to end absolute poverty by 2020.

As Dr. Huang explained, “When Xi Jinping became general secretary of the Party in 2012, the fight against poverty entered a new stage.”

For Xi Jinping, however, this “new stage” was merely a continuation of a battle he’d begun in his teens.