Poverty relief

Source: Sup China (8/24/17)
Poverty relief: Xi’s legacy?

As the American new media and commentariat were preparing their opinion pieces on Donald Trump’s deranged rant at a campaign-style rally in Phoenix on the evening of August 22, People’s Daily editors were hard at work on their top story for August 23 (in Chinese). It’s about the English and French versions of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s book on poverty alleviation titled Up and Out of Poverty, which you can pre-order on Amazon. Xinhua News Agency followed with an English story about the book’s release at the Beijing International Book Fair currently taking place in the capital.

This is not a one-off propaganda message:

  • A focus on poverty alleviation has been one of the key features of Xi’s tenure as China’s leader, along with the anti-corruption campaign, military reform, financial regulation, an assertive foreign policy, and growing repression of civil society voices.
  • In March we noted that eradicating poverty has been a core theme in state propaganda and an explicit priority for the Party throughout 2017, and that the government had set 2020 as the target year to finish building a “moderately prosperous society” — in other words, to lift the entire population out of poverty.

If Xi’s government can indeed eradicate poverty in China by 2020 and continue to grow the country’s economy and keep it stable, history may be inclined to forget the more unpleasant aspects of his rule, and remember Xi as the great alleviator of poverty.

But Xi faces formidable obstacles, including:

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