JIEYUAN VILLAGE, China – When the Chinese government offered free cows to farmers in Jieyuan, residents of the remote mountain community were skeptical. They feared that the authorities would ask them to return the cattle later, along with the calves they managed to raise.
But the farmers stayed with the cows and the money they brought. Others received small flocks of sheep. Government officials also paved a road to the city, built new houses for the poorest residents of the village and reused an old school as a community center.
Jia Huanwen, a 58-year-old farmer from a village in Gansu province, won a large cow three years ago that produced two healthy calves. He sold the cow in April for $ 2,900, the amount he earns in two years growing potatoes, wheat and corn on the nearby yellow clay slopes. Now he regularly buys vegetables for his family’s table and medicines for knee arthritis.
“It was the best cow I’ve ever had,” said Jia.
The village of Jieyuan is one of many successes in President Xi Jinping’s ambitious pledge to eradicate abject rural poverty by the end of 2020. In just five years, China says it has lifted more than 50 million farmers out of extreme poverty by the dizzying economic growth in cities.
But the village, one of six in Gansu visited by The New York Times without government supervision, is also a testament to the considerable cost of the Communist Party’s approach to poverty alleviation. This approach has relied on massive and possibly unsustainable subsidies to create jobs and build better housing.
Local cadres have spread to identify poor families – defined as living on less than $ 1.70 a day. They distributed loans, donations and even farm animals to poor residents. Authorities visited residents weekly to check on their progress.
“We are almost certain that the eradication of absolute poverty in China in rural areas has been successful – given the resources mobilized, we are less sure that it is sustainable or economical,” said Martin Raiser, World Bank director for China.
Beijing has poured nearly $ 700 billion in loans and grants for poverty alleviation in the past five years – about 1% of economic output each year. This excludes large donations from state-owned companies like State Grid, an energy transmission giant, which has invested $ 120 billion in electricity improvements in rural areas and has assigned more than 7,000 employees to work on poverty reduction projects.
The campaign took on a new urgency this year as the country faced the devastation of the coronavirus pandemic and severe flooding. One by one, the provinces announced that they had achieved their objectives. In early December, Mr. Xi declared that China had “achieved a significant victory that impresses the world”.
But Mr. Xi acknowledged that more efforts are needed to share the wealth more widely. A migrant worker in a coastal industrial city can earn in a month as much as a Gansu farmer in a year.
Mr Xi also asked the authorities to ensure that newly created jobs and aid to the poor do not decline in the years to come.
Gansu, China’s poorest province, declared in late November that it lifted its last counties out of poverty. Only a decade ago, poverty in the province was widespread.
Hu Jintao, the Chinese leader before Xi, visited people who lived in simple houses with little furniture. Residents ate so many potatoes that local authorities were embarrassed when a young woman initially refused to eat another one with Hu in front of the television cameras because she was tired of them, according to a cable released by WikiLeaks.
Although many villages are still accessible only by single lane roads, they are lined with lampposts powered by solar panels. New industrial scale pig farms, plant nurseries and small factories have emerged, creating jobs. Workers are building new houses for farmers.
Three years ago, Zhang Jinlu woke up in terror when the mud-bricked walls of his house weakened by the rain gave way. Half of the wood on the roof collapsed with slabs of earth, narrowly missing him and his mother.
Youfang village officials built a spacious concrete house for them with new furniture. Zhang, 69, now receives a monthly stipend of $ 82 through the anti-poverty program. His original house was rebuilt for him as a storage shed.
“This house used to be in ruins and would leak when it rained,” said Zhang.
The government helps private factories buy equipment and pay wages if they hire workers who are considered poor.
At Tanyue Tongwei Clothing & Accessories Company, in southeast Gansu, some 170 workers, mostly women, sewed school uniforms, T-shirts, jackets and face masks. Workers said several dozen employees received extra payments from the poverty reduction program in addition to their salaries.
Lu Yaming, the company’s legal representative, said Tanyue receives at least $ 26,000 a year in grants from poverty reduction programs – of which $ 500 a year has been paid to each of the 17 poor residents.
But the viability of these factories without continuous assistance is far from clear. Until subsidies arrived, the factory often had trouble paying wages on time, said Lu.
Unavoidable questions revolve around whether some families have used personal ties to local authorities to qualify for grants. Corruption investigators punished 99,000 people across the country in connection with last year’s poverty alleviation efforts, according to official statistics. At local restaurants in communities like Mayingzhen, where a well-seasoned plate of fried donkey meat costs $ 7, the conversation revolves around who received what and if they really should have qualified.
While the poverty reduction program has helped millions of poor people, critics point to the campaign’s rigid definitions. The program serves people classified as extremely poor sometime between 2014 and 2016, without adding others who may have gone through difficult times since then. It also does very little to help the poor in large cities where wages are higher, but workers must pay much more for food and rent.
In accordance with the government’s complicated criteria for determining eligibility for aid, anyone who owned a car, had more than $ 4,600 in assets, or had a new or recently rebuilt home was excluded. People living just above the government’s poverty line continue to struggle to survive, but often do not receive housing assistance or other benefits.
Zhang Sumei, a 53-year-old farmer, earns $ 1,500 a year from growing and selling potatoes and had to use her savings to build her concrete house. She says she should have qualified to help the extremely poor. Cultivating Gansu’s notoriously infertile soil is hard and difficult.
“In this society, poor families are called cadres and we have nothing.” she said bitterly.
The party’s campaign-style approach also fails to address deep problems that disproportionately affect the poor, including the cost of health care and other gaps in China’s emerging social safety net. The villages offer limited health insurance – only 17% of the cost of Jia’s arthritis medicine is covered, for example. Heavy medical bills can ruin families.
Yang Xiaoling, a 48-year-old worker at another government-subsidized factory in Gansu, wept uncontrollably when describing the crippling debt she faced after paying for her husband’s medical expenses, who suffered from kidney failure.
Three years ago, she borrowed $ 7,700 at zero interest from a bank affiliated with the poverty reduction program and was supposed to invest the money in the purchase of livestock. Instead, she borrowed more money from relatives and spent all the money on a kidney transplant and medicines for her husband.
Now, the entire loan is overdue and she has no money to repay it. Follow-up medical treatments for her husband consume her entire salary. Thus, the couple, their three children and the husband’s disabled parents survive on monthly government payments for poverty assistance of less than $ 50 per person.
“I don’t have the ability to pay it back. I can’t help it, ”sobbed Ms. Yang. “I have already borrowed a lot of money and now nobody lends it to me.”
Despite the challenges, the poverty alleviation program can have a long-term political benefit that helps to ensure that part of it survives. Gratitude for the program seems to be reinforcing the party’s political power in rural areas.
In Youfang, Zhang was quick to praise not only the program to combat poverty, but also Xi, comparing it to Mao.
“It is good for the country to have Xi Jinping,” he said, “and national policy is good.”
Chris Buckley contributed reporting from Sydney. Liu Yi, Amber Wang and Coral Yang contributed to the research.