© Provided by Xinhua TAIYUAN, Dec. 16 (Xinhua) In north China Shanxi Province, there lies a number of ancient villages boasting histories of over 1,
TAIYUAN, Dec. 15 (Xinhua) In north China Shanxi Province, there lies a number of ancient villages boasting histories of over 1,000 years. As China completed
TAIYUAN, Dec. 15 (Xinhua) In north China Shanxi Province, there lies a number of ancient villages boasting histories of over 1,000 years. As China completed
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Chinese Countryside Better Off Than Ever Before, While Some Reforms Stagnate
Posted by Joseph Brouwer | Jan 26, 2021
Sceptics understandably ask whether China fiddled its numbers in order to win what it calls the “battle against poverty”. There are of course still isolated cases of abject deprivation. China, however, set itself a fairly high bar. It has regularly raised the official poverty line, which, accounting for living costs, is about $2.30 a day at prices prevailing in 2011. (By comparison, the World Bank defines as extremely poor those who make less than $1.90 a day, as roughly a tenth of human beings do. Poverty lines in rich countries are much higher: the equivalent line in America is about $72 a day for a four-member household at 2020 prices.) In 1978, shortly after Mao’s death, nearly 98% of those in the countryside lived in extreme poverty, by China’s current standards. By 2016 that was down to less than 5% (see chart).