Exploring poverty in China
In January, Robert Walker, Research Associate and Professor Emeritus, was one of 12 foreign experts invited to meet with the Chinese Premier Li Keqiang, in the Great Hall of the People. The occasion was the consultation of the 2019-2020 National Plan being prepared by China’s State Council, the chief administrative authority of the People's Republic of China. During the two-day event Professor Walker spoke about the policy implications of taking a dynamic and multidimensional perspective on poverty in the context of China’s intention to eradicate poverty by 2020, and the Sustainable Development goals that require all countries to halve poverty in all its dimensions by 2030. Two Nobel laureates, Paul Romer (Economics, 2018) and Konstantin Novoselov (Physics, 2010) were among the other foreign experts consulted.
What can I say about living and working in Beijing?
Estimates of Beijing’s population vary markedly depending on whether people without residency permits are counted. But, let us say that it is a city large enough to be a viable nation state with 21 million inhabitants rather than citizens. Many inhabitants claim that it is impossible to find any litter in Beijing. That is not true. I know so because I found a discarded piece of paper lodged in undergrowth when I got lost in one of Beijing’s many parks. However, my street is washed nightly, and the pavement is always table-clean.
In marked contrast, many Westerners believe that Beijing is heavily polluted. And it is true that, for the last week, I have been unable to see the mountains clearly from my apartment. Equally, I travelled 2,100 kilometres from Beijing to Xiamen (a mainland city opposite Taiwan) and, due to smog, I was unable ever to see more than 100 metres from the high-speed train. Returning to Beijing and to blue skies was a delight. Beijing has largely been cleansed of pollution (although Beijingers still converse about pollution in the same way as Brits talk about the weather). Repeating this cleansing nationwide is an immense task. China already leads the world in renewable energy production, but it also burns more coal than any other country. According to the World Bank, 750,000 Chinese people die each year due to pollution.
(Professor Robert Walker with Premier Li Keqiang)
Beijing is also seeking to cleanse itself of migrant labour; well, low-skilled, migrant labour. Living in Beijing makes transparent how dependent my middle-class life-style is on the low wages of others. It is as cheap to dine out well as it is to cook at home. Order anything on-line and it arrives on a cycle cart within minutes, certainly within hours. Luckin Coffee, a 2017 Chinese start-up that now has 2000 outlets and a target of 4,500 shops by year-end, delivers coffee to your desk before one could reach the front of a Starbucks’ queue. In 2017, Beijing’s population fell for the first time in 20 years. I am not sure how middle class Beijingers will adapt to the disappearance of cheap migrant labour.
China is trying to cleanse itself of poverty too. Here, as in the previous paragraph, I am knowingly using language that is offensive in order to capture the shifting tonality of Chinese political discourse. In the years following the economic ‘opening-up’ of China, people living in poverty have been transformed from political heroes to public villains. Poverty, locally defined at a 2017 purchasing power equivalent of US$2.10/day, is to be entirely eradicated by 2020 (This is rural poverty, there is no national measure of urban poverty in China; the World Bank’s international poverty standard is USD
1.90/day, while that for lower-middle-income countries is USD 3.20). The strategy of precision-targeting makes officials personally responsible for ensuring that individuals named on a fixed list are not poor in 2020. Press reports suggest a document discussed by the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress on 26th February recommends a policy of family-based education and punishment to eliminate undesirable attitudes that hinder the eradication of poverty.
As a foreign expert living in Beijing, I am accorded great respect, much kindness and, it seems, a degree of access to key policymakers. The reality is that I know very little of Chinese culture and even less about the political process. I confess, though, that, as the author of The Shame of Poverty, I am struggling to avoid falling into the trap of cultural imperialism by offering ill-informed policy prescription.
Robert Walker
Robert Walker is an Associate Fellow and Professor Emeritus and Emeritus Fellow of Green Templeton College. He took up a position at Beijing Normal University in October 2018.
He joined the Department as Professor of Social Policy in April 2006 when he also became a Fellow of what is now Green Templeton College. He was formerly Professor of Social Policy at the University Nottingham and before that Professor of Social Policy Research, Loughborough University where he was Director of the Centre for Research in Social Policy. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and was awarded an MBE in 2012 for his services to social policy research. His recent research includes two major international studies. The first, funded by the ESRC and DFID, sought to establish whether 'shame-proofing' anti-poverty programmes, remodelling them to promote human dignity and to reduce stigma, improves their overall effectiveness. The second study, undertaken with ATD Fourth World, was a deeply participative study working with people experiencing poverty in Bangladesh, Bolivia, Tanzania, Britain, France and the USA to the define the dimensions of poverty that should be considered within the framework of the Sustainable Development Goals. In addition, he is undertaking research exploring the representation of poverty in China through the medium of film.