by Dee Knight

China’s historic achievement of eliminating extreme poverty across the country can be compared with the Long March, the legendary escape from fascist repression that saved the revolution nearly a century ago. The Long March enabled the Communist Party to set up revolutionary base areas and launch the bold and massive land reform that was the first step in overcoming poverty for millions of peasants.

Much of the struggle in both the Long March and the Targeted Poverty Alleviation (TPA) campaign took place in China’s remote mountain areas, far removed from the major cities located on the country’s eastern and southern coasts. In these cities, large-scale socialist industrialization was the motor of China’s rapid development. But the development was uneven: industrialization propelled the cities to advance ahead of the countryside, requiring a large-scale campaign to correct the imbalance.

Commenting on this campaign, President Xi Jinping said: 

“China’s overall productive forces have significantly improved and in many areas our production capacity leads the world. The more prominent problem is that our development is unbalanced and inadequate. This has become the main constraining factor in meeting the people’s increasing needs for a better life.” 

According to the landmark 2021 study Serve the People: The Eradication of Extreme Poverty in China by Tings Chak of the Tricontinental Institute for Social Research, in the TPA campaign, the Party mobilized 800,000 members to go to areas of deep poverty to visit and survey every household across the country. Then it mobilized more people to verify the data, then dispatched over three million cadres to poor villages to work directly with residents. Of that number, about half a million were carefully selected to act as village first secretaries of the Party.¹

It was the heroism of thousands of Party leaders and organizers that led to success. “Many cadres were unable to return home to visit families for long stretches of time,” the Serve the People study says. “Some fell ill in the harsh natural conditions of rural areas and more than 1,800 Party members and officials lost their lives in the fight against poverty.”

Rugged, cave-filled mountains form the border between China’s provinces of Hunan and Guizhou, where some of the earliest steps of the Long March were taken. The people there are isolated from the thriving nearby industrial cities to the north and south. Guangzhou and Shenzhen, close to bustling Hong Kong, are vibrant show-places of China’s lightning-fast development in recent decades. Many poor families who lived west of the mountains sent their men, or both parents, to the factories in Guangzhou, leaving the children in the care of their grandparents. That was their way of coping with the region’s deep poverty. (Guangzhou was formerly known as Canton.)

These mountains had sheltered the beleaguered Chinese Red Army in the Long March. The TPA campaign can be considered a return of the revolution to the isolated mountain people. As part of launching the campaign, in November 2013, Communist Party General Secretary Xi Jinping made his way along an unpaved dirt road to Shibadong (literally “18 Caves”) Village to visit the residents there^.2 His hosts were an aging couple of the Miao ethnic minority, one of China’s 55 officially recognized ethnic minorities, with a population of about 11 million. The Miao are the largest of Guizhou’s 17 ethnic minority communities, which together comprise roughly 40 percent of the province’s population of about 40 million. President Xi needed a language interpreter to communicate with them.

When Xi Jinping entered their house the villagers recalled that “he looked at the barn and asked if we had enough food to eat, if we planted fruit trees, and if we raised pigs. He also went to the pigpen to see if the pigs were big and fat.” Speaking later with a group of villagers, President Xi gave advice for developing Shibadong Village. “We should adapt our measures to local conditions, and go for targeted poverty alleviation.” 

President Xi compared Shibadong Village to a famous nearby national forest park, which was featured in the movie Avatar, with dense forests, deep ravines, deep canyons, unusual peaks, caves, and pillar-like rock formations. He suggested rural tourism could be fostered and combined with cooperative farm industry, such as fruit plantations and cattle breeding, as well as Miao handicrafts.

Village First Secretaries: The Strategic Core of Targeted Poverty Alleviation

The key was leadership at local, county and provincial levels: a work team composed of the natural leaders locally and young Communist Party officials in the region who were well versed in rural work, able to speak the local language, and understand local customs. The role of the Party was crucial. It dispatched a carefully selected village first secretary who was transferred to the village to work there as a resident official for poverty reduction—to “go all out in support of the village’s Party branch.” The first secretaries’ average age was 37. Nearly half of them had master’s degrees. But most important was their high social and political consciousness, to “take roots in the rural areas, brave all hardship, and lead the local people to win the fight against poverty with their wisdom, toil and sweat.”

I met such a “selected leader,” a government functionary in her “day job” in the southwestern province of Guizhou, who answered the call to volunteer in the TPA campaign. She told of her experience as a first secretary in a Miao village, visiting all the residents, identifying the local leaders and making inventory of strengths, needs and resources. She helped train and develop the local Party leadership, and organized work teams for each project. She was especially proud of a marketing plan for local handicrafts, which allowed the villagers to generate income from their treasure trove of products and talents. 

The Party was the glue linking the village work team with support resources from across the country. Cities that were already prosperous were mobilized to send all kinds of help. Leaders there pressured private companies to “adopt” village work teams. For example, the internet giant Alibaba was “drafted” to connect the villages to the internet. Public and private sectors got involved to provide poor people with access to financing (loans, subsidies and microcredit), technical training, equipment, and markets. 

It was a united front. President Xi said “We should mobilize the energies of our whole Party, our whole country, and our whole society… We will pay particular attention to helping people increase confidence in their own ability to lift themselves out of poverty.”

The “Foolishness” of Moving Mountains

The ancient fable of the Foolish Old Man Who Dared to Move Mountains is a Chinese favorite. Nearly all Chinese school children know the story by heart. In the modern version, the “old man” is understood to be the Communist Party, and the mountains were feudalism, capitalism, and imperialism. But in the remote mountains of Guizhou province where ethnic minorities predominate, the famous story got a new version, with the “foolish old man” replaced by Ms. Deng Yingxiang, who led her village over many years to forge a tunnel through a cage-like mountain that had trapped them in isolation and poverty.

The village’s entrapment in the mountain caused enormous hardship. Deng Yingxiang lost her first child due to the difficulty of carrying the feverish baby through a treacherous mountain path to a hospital. Cattle herded along the steep mountain path by the villagers often fell off the cliff and died. When the county government planned a rural power grid project in 1999, it wasn’t possible to transport utility poles and transformers to the isolated village, so grid construction was postponed. That was the last straw. 

The villagers decided to dig a primitive tunnel, at least large enough to get utility poles and transformers through, so the village could be electrified. Deng Yingxiang led a work group digging through the mountain with hand tools ten hours a day for several years. The villagers recognized her tough tenacity, encouraged her to become a Party member and elected her to the village branch committee. In that role, she was determined to speed up the tunnel project, calling on the township and county governments to help her buy an old tractor, rent an air compressor, and buy some explosives. Ten years after the first tunneling began, in December 2010, Deng Yingxiang spoke at a groundbreaking ceremony saying “We have been trapped here in the mountains for generations and we have suffered a lot. Today I swear that even if I have to dig with my hands and bite with my teeth, we will have a road connecting to the outside world.”

Yingxiang and her husband organized drilling teams with the other villagers, and mobilized at every level possible—county government, urban construction bureaus, forestry and water conservancy bureaus, and much more. After 270 days of hard work, a tunnel 216 meters long, five meters high and four meters wide was completed. People could drive cars through the tunnel to the village for the first time ever. Village life changed dramatically. Villagers built brick houses, bought motorcycles and even cars. Children could walk to school in thirty minutes.

As leader of the villagers’ committee, Deng Yingxiang mobilized funds from county and provincial levels to build an activity center and a cultural plaza. She helped renovate more than 200 houses, installed a 4G mobile base station and upgraded the power grid, rebuilt and expanded access roads, and secured safe drinking water in the village. She also established “joyful farmhouse” diners, small supermarkets, and an e-commerce platform. Villagers who had been migrant workers were able to return home and help form growers’ cooperatives and industrial development projects—“planting fruit trees and herbal medicine in the mountain, growing rice and vegetables in the field, raising chickens and ducks at the waterside, raising black pigs at home.”

Deng Yingxiang’s leadership was the key to success. She was able to galvanize the villagers to continue with many more improvements. Through joining the three forces of the village Party branch committee, the villagers’ committee, and a new ecological agriculture development cooperative, they transformed their lives.

A “Workaholic” Village First Secretary

Gao Shanshan was a notable village first secretary. She was nicknamed a “workaholic” by the villagers she led in the old revolutionary base area of northern Shanxi province, near the border with Mongolia. When she won an award for outstanding performance working with the villagers, Gao said “I think the remoter and poorer a mountainous village one works in, the more one can hone her ability and temperament; and the more difficult the environment is, the more one can grow and be enlightened…”

As village first secretary, Gao used the Party’s “seven-in-one” toolkit of poverty alleviation measures: industrial development, Party building, social welfare, remolding people’s thinking, sharing culture and knowledge, improving infrastructure, and starting local businesses. She made a study tour of cities outside her assigned areas, then held meetings with villagers on her return to share advanced thinking and methods. With help from the Communist Youth League’s Central Committee, she launched a “dream-assistance” project called “constant self-exertion and high and grand aspiration.” She won support from private companies and foundations, as well as educational institutions in Beijing, for village education initiatives, and inspired the villagers she worked with, arousing their enthusiasm to escape poverty. They told her “We will follow in whatever you do!”

The Campaign’s Impact

In February 2021, the Chinese government announced that extreme poverty had been abolished in China. It was the culmination of decades of revolution, beginning even before the triumph in 1949. The early decades of socialist construction laid the foundation that was enriched and deepened during the Reform and Opening Up period. In the “targeted” phase that began in 2013, the Chinese government built more than a million kilometers of rural roads, brought internet access to 98 percent of the country’s poor villages, renovated homes for millions of people and built new ones for millions more.

The Communist Party leadership mobilized broad sectors of the society—millions of people, state-owned and private enterprises, educational institutions, and the military, which assisted nearly a million people in more than 4,000 villages, contributing infrastructure and health projects. This was socialist leadership at its best. A participant in a recent Friends of Socialist China visit said that socialism is “doing the most important work there is, which is lifting up people’s lives and solving huge complicated problems like poverty, climate change, and attacks on sovereignty and threats of war.”

The poverty alleviation program assures a minimum income and “two assurances” of food and clothing, plus “three guarantees” of basic medical services, safe housing with drinking water and electricity, and free and compulsory education. Life expectancy in China was just over 30 in 1949. Now it is 78—higher than in the United States. Illiteracy has been largely eliminated across the country.

The Serve the People study by Tings Chak summed up the success of the Targeted Poverty Alleviation program this way: “TPA’s industrial poverty alleviation policies impacted 98 percent of poor households and established 300,000 industrial bases for agricultural production as well as animal breeding and processing across each of 832 poor counties. Millions of poor people are employed in these bases, plus millions more in rural enterprises. Poverty alleviation workshops (small-scale centers of production organized on idle land or in people’s homes) contributed to nearly tripling the per capita income of poor households from 2015 to 2019…”

In the cases of people living in extremely remote areas or exposed to frequent natural disasters, the TPA helped people move from rural to newly built urban or suburban communities. New housing was constructed, along with thousands of schools and kindergartens, hospitals, community health centers, elder-care facilities and cultural centers.

Ecological conservation and restoration have been key methods to address poverty. Afforestation in desert areas has mobilized thousands of poverty alleviation cooperatives. The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) has ranked China as a global leader in reforestation, accounting for 25 percent of the world’s total growth in “leaf area” between 1990 and 2020.

Infrastructure Development as Economic Motor 

Alongside the giant Targeted Poverty Alleviation campaign, China has implemented the most ambitious infrastructure development in human history. Trains, highways, bridges, seaports and airports, together with internet and telephone connectivity, have transformed the country’s infrastructure, employing millions of workers, while dynamizing economic linkage between the cities and countryside. Health and education is now within reach for China’s entire population.

For the people of Guizhou, the poverty alleviation campaign ran parallel with massive infrastructure projects—building many bridges and high-speed highways, and making Guiyang, Guizhou’s capital, a hub for bullet trains running north to south and southeast to northwest, criss-crossing in Guiyang. This surge of development has been the hallmark of the policy of Common Prosperity—a way of “leveling” the country’s new-found wealth.

There are pundits in the West who say China’s momentum of success can’t last, that it “can’t afford” to spend billions on poverty alleviation, and infrastructure that may not be immediately profitable. These calculations fail to grasp that China’s socialist path has laid the basis for long-term viability, based on Common Prosperity. It has unleashed the economic capacity of half the population who previously were isolated. In fact, this new path is inspiring leaders across the globe to emulate China’s success, leading to a shared future of common prosperity for the entire world.

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¹ Tings Chak (翟庭君) et al., Serve the People: The Eradication of Extreme Poverty in China, Studies on Socialist Construction (The Tricontinental Institute for Social Research, 2021), 62, https://thetricontinental.org/studies-1-socialist-construction/.

² The Contemporary World Press, Leaving No One Behind: China’s Stories of Poverty Alleviation, First (The Contemporary World Press, 2020).

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Dee Knight is the author of Befriending China: People-to-People Peacemaking, and A Realistic Path to Peace: From Genocide to Global War… And How We Can Stop It. He serves on the Advisory Council of the Friends of Socialist China, and on the China Working Group of the Democratic Socialists of America’s International Committee.