10 L. Reflection on the Definition of Poverty. (a snapshot)
The reality of poverty must be very different over the ages, and over the very different kinds of society it is measured in. Basically, poverty is not being able to meet your human needs.
Human needs are met with assets, and skills that know how to employ those assets. (2,300 words)
In the modern age we think of capital mostly as Financial Capital. We have money in the bank, and investments. We may have land with buildings that are useful to ourselves, or others that we rent them out to. We have factories, machinery, trained workers, that produce a product or service, a sales force that commercializes it, and supply chains that distribute it. Financial Capital can be sold or exchanged for liquidity.
Physical Capital are the things that aid us to produce those aims. We have electricity and petroleum, all the implements that run on that electricity, we have roads, public transport, ports and shipping, dams, sanitation, water and sewer, and now we even need WiFi as part of our connectivity.
There is Human Capital that keeps us away from poverty. It is our education and skill-set that allows us to utilize all of the physical capital, and interact with our society, perhaps it’s a complicated society.
In the end, all of life is dependent on Natural Capital. That is the bounty of nature, and our food chains. But if you are urbanized, you have no direct contact with natural capital. Take a walk in the park. Then poverty is defined as not having physical capital nor the necessary human capital to use it. Without supply chains, (more fragile than we might think), we cannot meet our needs.
If we are rural, we may be in direct contact with Natural Capital, and our human capital might be the know-how in what to do with it. We may not have electricity, roads, water or sewer, and limited or no machinery. We don’t know how to use any of that stuff either, and we might not even read or write. But if we have Natural Capital we can have a good rich life, just like our ancestors. Even 40 -50 years ago, those living on the Mekong River, caught fish in one day to feed the family for three days. The river regenerates the fish each year. In the forest, hunting and gathering, food stuffs, game, bamboo for making houses, thatched roofs, rattan for furniture, water for rice paddies. These people were not poor, because they could meet their needs.
Social Capital was also abundant, in the family and village relationships, and the festivals in the traditions and the religion. This is another part of their richness.
For the most part, I believe these people were driven off of their natural capital by outsiders. Commercial fishermen stretched nets across the river and captured the whole fish migrations. Industries and commercial agriculture dumped pollutants into the river. Dams for hydroelectric power (that the locals did not need), upset the whole ecology. Logging changed the forests; sand mining altered the river beds. Many were pushed into urbanization, which they had no skills for. Others just stayed with the continually degrading environment. Now these people were POOR. Their definition of poverty had shifted to lack of ‘dollars per day”.
Let’s take a snapshot of Chinese village life, and poverty.
The largest engineering social project in human history, that is, the establishment and practice of what was called the People’s Commune, occurred in rural China. (Other reasons are more contemporary and will have implications for years to come.) First, even after nearly half a century of Chinese industrialization, (from 1949), more than 70% per cent of the population remained rural. Second, the dismantling of the commune system in post-Mao China is assumed by many to have promoted the success of China’s economic reforms since the 1980s. We’ll see. Thirdly, increasing township enterprises in rural areas have become an important industrial force in China since the 1980s. And finally, with allegedly only 7 per cent of the world’s arable land, rural China has managed to feed more than 20 per cent of the world’s population.
Most of the studies of rural life have been on the areas of north or north-east China such as Shandong, Henan, Shaanxi; or coastal China such as the Yangzi Delta and the Pearl River Delta, or south-west China such as Sichuan and Yunnan. While no area can be said to be typical; Jiangxi, where Gao Village is located, is neither as developed as the coastal south, nor as underdeveloped as the north-west.
The present study covers a small area, a village of no more than a few hundred people, its time-scale is large. It covers a period of more than forty years including four important stages: the stage immediately before and after the land reform; the commune system; the dismantling of the commune system and immediately after; and the new development from the late 1980s to the mid-1990s.
In China. the political institutions, the economic system, the legal framework and cultural values of the People's Republic of China have discriminated against rural residents who are generically referred to as “peasants”. All developing nationalities depend on cheap labor which prerequisite is cheap food. Therefore, farmers in every country have been suppressed down to a subsistence level. (Not much different from feudal lords taxing the serfs.)
Radical policies such as those during the Cultural Revolution brought about visible improvements in areas such as education and health care for rural villagers, which was later undone. The establishment intellectuals, however, choose to ignore evidence of this kind. I’ll not talk about it here.
Gao Village is the smallest village of the three in the Guantian village committee. In 1997 Gao Village had a population of 351, including those who had left the village as migrant workers.’ They’re still registered in the village. All the villagers are named Gao except the women who have married into the village who usually retain their surnames. It is a system of lineage, you have a name, but your last name is the place you were born.
Despite China’s turbulent and often violent modern history, Gao Village has never experienced any war and nobody has ever died in battle. The Japanese invasion did not penetrate this area. Nor did the civil war between the Red Army and the KMT in the 1930s and again in the late 1940s
Gao Village is one of those places idealized in traditional Chinese landscapes: self-sufficient and idyllic. (This is a snapshot, things did change). Although the two nearest cities, Jiujiang and Jingdezhen, were once important in their own right, they had little impact on places like Gao Village. One important reason is that Gao Village was not connected by any means of modern transport. Only since the late 1980s has a gravel road, dusty when dry and muddy when wet, passed through Gao Village.
Until the late 1970s the village had been almost completely self-sufficient. It produced enough food for itself, and villagers wove their own clothes. Until 1977, when I left China for the UK, no villager except the village doctor could afford a watch, or a bicycle. Apart from loudspeakers installed at the production team headquarters which broadcasted government news through official wires and radios, there was no other electricity in the village until 1988. The villagers arranged their work and daily life according to natural light.
Because of plentiful rainfall and fertile land, it is an ideal place to grow rice. Surrounding Poyang Lake are numerous other lakes and tributary rivers. Apart from Poyang Lake itself; there are more than 120 lakes and 225 rivers in Boyang County. Everywhere around the rivers and lakes are paddy fields, green in spring and golden in summer.
The main crops in the area include rice, wheat, barley, sweet potatoes, soya beans, broad beans, peas, cotton, tea, tobacco, peanuts, sesame seeds, rape seeds, sugar cane, gunny and ramie, buckwheat, mullet, and a variety of vegetables and melons. Because of the rivers and lakes, the fishing industry is an important part of the economy in Boyang County. In 1985, for instance, the population involved in fishing reached 20,000 and harvested fish were recorded at 10,000 tons. (That’s all over the county, Gao village just a very small part.)
The hills used to provide firewood for the villagers, and the streams, ponds, the river and the lake used to provide the villagers with an irrigation system as well as fish and water plants. The paddy fields are terraced for rice and some of the hilly land can be used to produce economic crops such as cotton, sesame seeds, gunny and ramie, peanuts as well as sweet potatoes. Water plants are a good source of food for raising pigs, which are one of the main sources of protein for the villagers. From the river, the lake and numerous streams and ponds the villagers can catch shrimps, prawns, soft-shelled turtle, crabs, carp, trout, grass carp, silver carp, finless eels, field snails, snake-head fish, catfish, loach, mandarin fish, bream and a variety of freshwater mussels. Most of the different kinds of fish are from Poyang Lake, and every spring they migrate upwards to the tributary rivers and further up to thousands of lakes and streams to breed and lay eggs. Then they swim further up to millions of brooks and ponds to seek food. Some of the fish end up in the rice fields where the villagers can catch them easily. Another good source of food for the villagers are the dozen kinds of frogs which are at the same time natural enemies of insects. These frogs breed and live around ponds and rice fields and keep the harmful insects under control.
(Later, the continued use of modern fertilizers and pesticide have pretty well destroyed the water assets and aquatic life-cycles.)
All in all, Gao Village can function economically and socially as an independent entity without any connection with the outside world, as it had in fact been doing until the late 1970s. Yet Gao Village is not a remote mountainous place where there are hardly any people. There are numerous surrounding villages, most of them much bigger, and some with more than 1,000 households. In most cases, it is only half a kilometer from one village to another. Because of this proximity, there is no way to add any more land to the village. They are locked into fixed borders for generations, and must make the most of what they have.
They do not interact economically and one village does not in any sense depend on another. There are no commercial transactions between them, nor is there much cultural or social interaction. The population mass and intensive agricultural activities in the area have not led to any significant commercialization or qualitative change of lifestyle. Even today, the nearest markets are several kilometers away from Gao Village. The villages remain cellular, to use Viviene Shue’s insightful concept, in that each village is a separate entity and the reach of the state is now extremely limited, although the brutality of the local officials is felt.
The concept of “natural village” refers to a group of people living together in one location. They have the same surname, (because of the lineage system), they are housed together and they interact with each other in ways that they do not interact with people from other villagers. Excluding government control and interference, each village is an entity in itself: it has its own governing body and distinct local territory.
The cellular nature of rural life is also reflected linguistically. The whole of Jiangxi Province is supposed to speak a distinctive dialect called Gan, which is one of the ten major dialects in China.’ The other nine are Mandarin, Jin, Xiang, Wu, Yue (Cantonese), Min, Hakka, Hui, and Pinghua. [See Li Rong, S.A. Wurm et al., eds, Language Atlas of China, Hong Kong, 1987.] However, the Gan dialect itself is not undifferentiated.
The people in Boyang County speak Gan with one accent, while those in Duchang County speak with another. And the residents in Boyang County Town speak a variety of Gan that Gao villagers find hard to understand. A Gao villager who goes to Boyang County Town is looked down upon as an uneducated peasant simply because he or she cannot speak the town’s dialect. In fact, people in the major cities of Jiangxi Province such as Nanchang, Jiujiang and Jingdezhen all speak distinctive varieties of Gan. Wherever you come from, you betray your identity as “outsider” as soon as you start to speak.
You might say that urbanization, (for whatever reason), changes definitions to broaden the concept of poverty. There is a lot more to say about it.
Rural poverty alleviation in China has made significant progress in recent decades. According to various sources, the poverty rate in rural areas has declined dramatically. For instance, rural poverty fell from 96% in 1980 to less than 1% of the population in 2019. By 2018, the poverty rate had declined to below 0.5% when measured against an international poverty line of $1.90 per day. Some say $2.50/ day. We have been saying above, that you can’t always measure poverty with financial indicators. You have to look into what needs are not being met. The above snapshot was taken on or before 1980. Here we are talking almost 40 years later.
The Chinese government has invested heavily in poverty reduction efforts, with a focus on lifting rural households above the poverty line of 4,000 renminbi ($619) per person per year. Since 2015, the government has spent over $80 billion to end poverty, relocating millions of households from remote rural regions to new villages, constructing infrastructure, and providing direct cash transfers.
However, despite these achievements, rural poverty remains a complex issue. Many rural communities still struggle with limited access to clean water, insufficient means to improve their living conditions, and inadequate food security. The government’s poverty elimination campaign has primarily focused on lifting households above the poverty line, rather than addressing underlying structural issues such as rural human capital development.
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Interesting. I grew up in a one bedroom apartment in the Bronx. My parents slept in the living room next to a raging fire on the other side of the wall burning the building's garbage, day and night. My sister and I shared the bedroom until I turned thirteen. Our needs were met, but it was not pleasant. My dad always said we had all we needed, but we were all happy to move to a new "luxurious" three-bedroom apartment. By today's standard, we lived in poverty; by 1950s standard we were solidly middle class. I never thought we were poor or deprived or anything like that. This is the way life is; it never occurred to me to be dissatisfied. Everyone we knew lived like that. On the other hand, all of my parent's friends on a two-block stretch, left by the mid-fifties, and almost of their kids went to college; many became millionaires. I guess what I'm trying to say is that we shrugged off our not-so-great lives, but we knew things could get better, and our parents' generation recognized life's possibilities, were upwardly mobile, and worked our way out of it. From my vantage point today, we did indeed live in poverty. I'm just kind of thinking out loud. Does this make sense.