It’s not as simple as some critics might have you believe.
By
March 11, 2021
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Human rights champions in the West have many strong and compelling reasons to criticize China’s treatment of its citizens. In doing so, they often point out that these are not expressions of Western values but rights that belong to all people, drawing on the U.N.’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
These human rights advocates tend to ignore that the U.N. Declaration covers not merely political and legal rights but also economic and social ones. On this front, China has been doing quite a bit better and now is advancing on a remarkable new initiative. China first grew its economy for decades, at rates the West can only dream about, and, in the process, lifted some 700 million people from poverty into the middle class. In the West, politicians keep talking about reducing inequality, but instead it is growing, while China is now at the last stage of a major drive to end poverty f
China’s ‘poverty road’ drives only some to riches
Policies to eradicate extreme poverty by last year have lifted many rural Chinese above the nation’s threshold, but many still depend on sustained aid, an expert said
By Seow Beiyi / AFP, BAOJING, China
At his village along a “poverty alleviation road” in China’s Hunan Province, farmer Liu Qingyou shares a booklet detailing how Chinese President Xi Jinping’s (習近平) government has hoisted him and 100 million other Chinese from the breadline.
In it, the cause of his family’s hardship is diagnosed as “illness” and “schooling,” followed by a list of ways the government has helped, from grain subsidies to improving the yield of their orange groves.