In order to win the poverty alleviation “turnaround battle” and get into the top tier of the annual national assessment, a number of government officials were dismissed in Shaanxi Provice, where a tempest was brewing over the poverty alleviation policy.
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Caijing Special Report: A Chronicle of Poverty Alleviation in Shaanxi
By Bai Zhaodong, Caijing | Editor: Zhu Tao
Editor’s note:
In order to win the poverty alleviation “turnaround battle” and get into the top tier of the annual national assessment, a number of government officials were dismissed in Shaanxi Provice, where a tempest was brewing over the poverty alleviation policy.
Ensuring that the poorest people are not left behind by the rest of society is a shared wish of everyone with a conscience. Most people in China support taking public intervention policy measures to help the poor out of hardship and set out on a path of self-development. Since the launch of the reform and opening-up policy, China’s achievements in poverty reduction have been recognized worldwide. However, roughly 40 million people in Chia still live below the poverty threshold. If China can succeed in lifting them out of poverty, that will certainly become the most important Chinese national narrative.
However, as poverty alleviation campaigns intensify, some recent trends have caused concern among decision-makers, fatigue among policy enforcers, and confusion among the poor.
The central leadership had long taken note of this trend, and its stance was firm and clear. At the 39th collective study session of the Politburo on February 21, Xi Jinping stated, “Formalism must be prevented: poverty alleviation must reach those who truly need it and deliver genuine outcomes… so the results must be accepted by the people and must withstand the test of time.”
Later in mid-July, Wang Qishan, Secretary of the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, went to Zhangjiakou for an inspection. He called for close scrutiny of formalism, bureaucratism, and misconduct such as manipulation of data. He demanded prevention of the excessive issuance of documents and form-filing at all levels, as well as excessive red tape that hinders policy implementation, such as formalist rounds of meetings and documents that substitute for actual follow-through.
The State Council Poverty Alleviation Office also issued another notice on July 24, requiring local governments to stop practices that consume enormous amounts of grassroots cadres’ energy, such as frequent form-filling and data reports, preparing receptions for evaluation and inspection team visits, attending unnecessary and repetitive meetings, etc.
It should be recognized that people living in poverty today have characteristics different from those of the past, and that helping them escape poverty requires acknowledging the long-term, persistent nature of the work. Setting short-term tasks, quotas and targets not only fails to solve the real problem, but can even shift the focus of poverty alleviation away from the poor themselves and toward a competition among officials and local governments.
(Photo: Li Li)
It was the sixth lunar month—peak farming season in northern Shaanxi. 44-year-old Fan Desheng was standing in his courtyard, leaning on crutches. He could only watch passively, unable to help, as his 69-year-old mother carried water and worked the fields.
Fan Desheng was a farmer from Mahuyu Village, Mizhi County, Shaanxi Province. He suffered from polio shortly after birth, and a surgery a few years ago left him completely unable to take care of himself. On the wall of the Fan family’s cave dwelling hung a “targeted poverty alleviation household information card”, recording the family’s details.
Located on the west bank of the Wuding River, Mahuyu Village is one of the relatively prosperous villages in Mizhi County. Although a drinking-water infrastructure project was implemented years ago, falling groundwater levels year by year had long plagued residents’ access to water. As the Fan family was located at a higher elevation, this was especially true for them. Tap water flowed through the pipes only once every ten days. The rest of the time they had to rely on stored water.
The water problem soon triggered a chain of bureaucratic responses. The problem of poor households in Mahuyu Village having difficulty accessing drinking water was discovered by the Ankang Poverty Alleviation Rectification Cross-Inspection Team in early June 2017. The team also discovered that the village was being incorrectly removed from the poverty alleviation list. When the team left on June 18, it submitted a list of feedback regarding its poverty alleviation work to Yulin.
The Yulin Poverty Alleviation Leading Group Office forwarded the feedback list to each county and district on June 19, demanding that every problem listed be rectified by June 30. The next day, the Yulin Supervision Bureau announced that the Mizhi County Party Committee had summoned Shigou and Longzhen town government officials at deputy section level and above for a meeting, citing their poor performance in targeted poverty alleviation work. On that same day, four officials of Mizhi County Poverty Alleviation Office, including one director and three deputy directors, were dismissed.
The consequences soon extended beyond Mizhi County. The Shaanxi Provincial Poverty Alleviation Leading Group announced the ranking results of its inspection on July 4, and shortly thereafter held reprimands with Party Committee and government officials in charge of poverty alleviation of Yulin and two other cities that ranked lowest. Besides, admonitory talks took place at the county and district level, with Party Committee and government officials in charge of poverty alleviation in Hu County (Huyi District) and two other counties and districts that ranked last in the province beig summoned.
On July 17, the Shaanxi Provincial Party Committee Organisation Department issued a public statement of provincial-level official appointments, including appointments for new Party Committee Secretary and Chief Executive of Hu County. According to an informed source, the simultaneous replacement of the county’s Party Committee Secretary and Chief Executive was likely due to poor performance on poverty alleviation, especially the slow progress on relocating those living under adverse natural conditions.
This was not the first time that leading officials had been summoned for talks by the central government regarding bad performance in poverty alleviation. According to public records, on June 8, Shaanxi government held a video conference, demanding “high-quality completion of rectification work and targeted poverty support” to ensure victory in the “turnaround battle” and get into the top tier of the national annual assessment after Shaanxi’s poverty alleviation efforts had ranked near the bottom in 2016. The meeting also demanded that Shaanxi first conduct its own inter-city cross inspection before the national poverty alleviation inspection tour. The next day, cities across Shaanxi formed inspection teams, using methods such as reviewing archives, household surveys, and on-site verification to inspect their own poverty alleviation work. A storm over poverty alleviation policy was about to break.
Who Are the Truly Poor Households?
Hua Qilin, a resident of Guanping Village in Hu County, Xi’an, fell into dire straits after a family crisis several years ago. In 2010, Hua Qilin’s family was identified as a poor household. Five years later, in 2015, although his family’s economic situation had not improved significantly, a village review determined that they had been lifted out of poverty. Since Hua Qilin and his father together earned roughly 30,000 yuan a year, which meant the six-person household’s average annual income per person reached about 5,000 yuan, and therefore exceeded the provincial poverty line.
“If income alone is used as the quantitative indicator of poverty, then to some extent poor households can be easily lifted out of poverty,” said a division-level official in Yulin. But the causes of poverty are multifaceted—health, education, housing, and more—and equal income does not necessarily mean an equal standard of living.
As a hub of the northwest, Shaanxi’s history of poverty alleviation spans more than two decades. The “8-7 National Poverty Reduction Program”, which ran from 1994 to 2000, was followed by continued efforts after the turn of the century. During this period, the province introduced a series of measures and invested huge amounts of money, but the results fell short of expectations.
Currently, Shaanxi still has 3.1672 million people living below the provincial poverty line. Of the country’s 14 contiguous areas of concentrated extreme poverty, three involve Shaanxi. The province also has 56 national poor counties—more than half of all its counties and districts—and 8,808 poor villages, which is about a third of the province’s total.
During an inspection tour of Xiangxi, Hunan in November 2013, Xi Jinping first proposed the concept of “targeted poverty alleviation”. He said, “Poverty alleviation must be practical and tailored to local context. The key is to do targeted poverty alleviation, and avoid chanting slogans and setting overambitious goals.” From then on, the direction of targeted poverty alleviation was formally established, and a series of top-level designs and operating mechanisms took shape.
On May 12, 2014, the State Council Poverty Alleviation Office issued “The Implementation Plan for Establishing a Targeted Poverty Alleviation Working Mechanism”, which set out to provide accurate identification, targeted support, precise management, and careful assessment of poor households and villages. Provinces were required to complete a “poverty registration” by the end of October 2014, with related data registered on an intranet, dynamically monitored, and updated annually.
Poverty registration refers to the filing of electronic information about poor households, villages, counties and contiguous areas of extreme poverty across the country, documenting the entire poverty alleviation process. For example, each poor household is issued an information card, and only after being registered can it have access to a series of poverty alleviation resources.
At the same time, the Shaanxi Provincial Poverty Alleviation Office also issued its own documents, specifying the steps and deadlines for poverty registration of poor households. Poor households were identified according to the provincial poverty standard: those with an annual per-capita net income below 2,875 yuan would be registered as poor. The document also requested provincial data entry to be completed by October 20, 2014.
Shaanxi’s provincial poverty line was 139 higher than China’s national poverty threshold of 2,736 yuan per person. At the end of 2014, Shaanxi had 4.51 million people below the national poverty line and 5.75 million below the provincial line.
Among the central government’s “Six Precisions” for poverty alleviation—precision of target, arrangement of projects, use of funds, measures to the household, stationing of first village secretary, and effect of poverty alleviation—precision in identifying who qualified as poor was the first challenge to solve.
Under Shaanxi’s 2014 household poverty registration, the identification of targets was first done by “scale decomposition”. Using the province’s rural poor population as the base figure, the task of identifying qualifying poor households was allocated level by level down to each administrative village.
On October 13, 2015, Xinhua reported that Mashan County in Guangxi had improperly identified 3,119 people as targets for poverty alleviation. Among them, 343 were on the government payroll, 2,454 had purchased a total of 2,645 vehicles, 43 had bought or built homes in the county, and 439 were self-employed businesspeople or company operators. To prevent similar problems, the central government demanded nationwide “follow-up checks” for household poverty registrations.
In late October 2015, the Shaanxi Provincial Poverty Alleviation Office issued guidance for these “follow-up checks”, along with nine criteria for identifying poor households, later dubbed by the province’s official media as “Nine Red Lines”. The intent of setting these criteria was to remove households that no longer qualified to have access to poverty alleviation measures. This became a highlight of the province’s targeted poverty alleviation efforts, prompting other provinces to follow suit.
The guidance also required that for problems uncovered during the “follow-up checks”, poverty alleviation officials take representative samples of counties, villages, and households to conduct field inspections, analyze causes, and develop targeted solutions. They were also required to track the effectiveness of these “follow-up checks”. An informed source told Caijing that, influenced by the Mashan County incident in Guangxi, counties across Yulin removed a considerable number of poor households after applying “Nine Red Lines”.
Unexpectedly, the central government publicly criticised Shaanxi government in April 2017, pointing to multiple shortcomings in its poverty alleviation work, such as lacking precision in removing targets, misusing funds, failing to provide adequate poverty support, and poorly implementing of policies. Shaanxi government was also criticised for adding and removing poverty status to the same households in the same year, within the same year, and relying excessively on fiscal bottom-line guarantees rather than fostering self-motivated development.
The Shaanxi Provincial Party Committee held a Standing Committee meeting to convey the central government’s criticism on April 11, 2017. Shortly afterward, the provincial government issued a rectification notice, requiring localities to conduct comprehensive self-inspections and corrective action in response to the criticism raised, with the inspection focus mainly on improving the accuracy of identifying and removing poor households, as well as public satisfaction. Ten days earlier, the Provincial Poverty Alleviation Office had already issued a notice requiring a comprehensive review, demanding all 98 counties and districts tasked with poverty alleviation to do a comprehensive inspection in alignment with the “Nine Red Lines” and the provincial poverty line, aiming to “remove all who should be removed, and include all who should be included”.
Yulin’s response came swiftly. Starting in late April, counties across Yulin began verifying data on poor households. As a large number of households were removed from the list, the resulting statistics became abnormal. In some townships, more than half of registered poor households were removed; in Fujiagou Village, Suide County, all households previously on the list were removed; in Hujiagou Village, Zizhou County, only 12 out of the 71 poor households recorded in 2016 remained after verification. This alarmed officials at the Provincial Poverty Alleviation Office, whose supervision team quickly halted the verification process and proposed corrective measures. An informed source revealed that the provincial supervision team viewed the mass removal of households as a form of “poverty alleviation by manipulation of data”.
One township official said that if the verification plan had been strictly followed, it would not be surprising for a large number of households aside from special cases with no labor capacity to be removed. If one member of a four-person household works outside the home and earns around 15,000 yuan a year, that is not difficult to achieve, and once averaged across family members, it would already exceed the poverty-line income threshold. Many township officials later concluded that the household verification conducted under the “Nine Red Lines” had been relatively solid, and the remaining ones on the list were considered “minimum livelihood guarantee households” and “safety net households”.
According to the newspaper Yulin Daily, in response to the sharp swings in poverty figures after data verification, the Yulin Poverty Alleviation Leading Group issued an urgent notice demanding that counties and districts sort and classify newly added poor households, with particular scrutiny of cases involving elderly people identified jointly with their legal caregivers, to ensure strict compliance with policy. “Joint identification” means taking into account the economic status of adult children of elderly people as a factor in determining whether they qualify as poor. For instance, if a person works for a government body or state-owned enterprise, the elderly parent cannot be identified as poor. Meanwhile, Yulin also pledged to carry out rectifications in line with the suggestions of the Provincial Poverty Alleviation Supervision Team.
As of now, the number of poor households in Fujiagou Village, Suide County, has been restored to 86, close to the pre-verification figure. In Hujiagou Village, Zizhou County, the number has likewise been restored to its earlier level, with five additional households added on top of that, bringing the current total to 76.
The difficulty of precise identification has a flip side: imprecise removal from poverty status. If identifying the poor was difficult, determining who had escaped poverty proved just as fraught. According to “The Shaanxi Province Suggestions on the Implementation of Exiting Poverty Status Policies” in 2016, a household was considered to have exited poverty if they met the following criteria: annual per-capita net income above the poverty line, safe housing, no children had dropped out of compulsory education, and all family members were enrolled in the new rural cooperative medical system and major-illness insurance.
However, a township government secretary told Caijing that the exit policy for poor households has since changed again, now requiring “Two Assurances and Three Guarantees”— assurance of adequate food and clothing, and guaranteed access to compulsory education, basic medical services and safe housing—along with stable income. In other words, even if a household’s income exceeds the poverty line, it is still classified as poor if “Two Assurances and Three Guarantees” have not been met.
As the standards keep shifting, the government’s own count of who has actually escaped poverty remains unclear. In 2017, Shaanxi reported to the central government that 1.07 million people had been lifted from poverty. However, the provincial figure was revised down to 0.8 million after submission. The number was revised again to 0.97 million and signed for confirmation by the mayors and party secretaries of each city.
In addition, in Yang County, Hanzhong, 8,619 people who met the criteria for poverty were never registered, while 611 households that did not meet the criteria were identified as poor households and therefore had access to poverty alleviation policy benefits in 2016. In January 2017, the Shaanxi provincial government announced that Foping and Dingbian counties had “been lifted out of poverty”. However, a third-party evaluation later determined that neither county had actually met the standard for exiting poverty status.
(Source: Shaanxi Provincial Poverty Alleviation Office | Graphic: Liu Jie)
Hidden Concerns about Policy Swings
Nowhere were the effects of these policy swings more visible than in Mizhi County. Located in northern Shaanxi under the jurisdiction of Yulin, Mizhi County was a National Poor County. Mizhi County had a total population of 230,000, and its total fiscal revenue was 200 million yuan in 2015. As of June 2017, it had 33,900 registered poor individuals in 12,700 households.
The village cadres in Changxingzhuang Village, Mizhi County, were deeply struck by the frequent policy adjustments from higher levels. On one occasion, a notice arrived from the town government in the middle of a village public review session, stating the policy had changed and the reviews needed to be suspended. With policy shifting back and forth, villagers began to suspect the village cadres of having something fishy under the table.
The problem was not confined to Changxingzhuang. As various new poverty alleviation measures were introduced one after another, the once-quiet village grew restless. A village cadre in Hujiagou Village, Zizhou County, told Caijing that village cadres had become punching bags of the villagers because poverty policies were adjusting too rapidly. Also, only a handful of really poor households in the village stood out from the rest; the other families lived under fairly similar conditions, which made it very difficult to determine which of them should qualify as poor.
“Rural people aren’t afraid of poverty—what they fear the most is unfairness,” this official said. In May, when the verification inspection left only 12 households registered as poor, villagers actually had fewer objections, because the ones who remained were genuinely poor. But once the policy changed again and the count was only slightly adjusted from the original baseline, dissatisfaction grew among villagers.
Villager Miao Qinggui said the households were removed from Hujiagou’s poverty alleviation list because they had crossed one of the “Nine Red Lines”. Some people had lent out money and were living off the interest while still receiving poverty alleviation benefits. If the principle of “broad entry and strict exit” were applied, Miao argued that his own circumstances were no better than those of the registered poor households, and that he too should therefore be entitled to poverty alleviation benefits.
In Caijing’s investigation, reporters found that competing to be identified as a poor household was a widespread phenomenon across counties in Yulin, with disputes sometimes turning physical. In one case, a person even attempted suicide by drinking pesticide in a desperate bid to be recognized as poor. Moreover, Yulin has steadily increased its support for poor households—not only in housing, healthcare, and education, but also in the form of an annual business development grant of up to 5,000 yuan per household. This increased support has itself become a major source of conflict.
Disputes stemming from poverty alleviation policies have also evolved into digging up dirt on each other. Some villagers have dredged up the past of the others and filed formal complaints with discipline-inspection authorities under their real names. During investigation in Yulin, Caijing reporters also received multiple complaint materials covering not only poverty alleviation and subsistence allowance issues, but also allegations of village cadres falsely claiming or misappropriating poverty alleviation benefits.
On June 30, the Yulin Poverty Alleviation Leading Group Office issued a notice demanding that state-owned enterprises within the city arrange jobs for 3,000 poor individuals within a year, with requirements of at least an associate degree and an age range of 18 to 50.
A poverty alleviation official told Caijing that if the work of identifying poor households was not done properly, then the greater the level of support given to those households, the sharper the resulting disputes would become. New forms of unfairness and a “free-rider” problem would also emerge as policies keep swinging back and forth.
(If the work of identifying poor households is not done properly, greater support for such households may sharpen disputes within the society. Photo credit: Visual China Group)
The Pressure of “Forms”
An official in Mizhi County told Caijing that the most vivid memory of three years of grassroots organising work was filling out forms. From November 2016 until the time of this interview, his main job was to fill out forms, including registration forms, survey forms, information collection forms, poverty support cards, poverty alleviation handbooks, rectification ledge, etc. Each poor household’s file alone requires roughly 12 forms and documents, plus another “care service” folder requiring 10 more forms, bringing the total to 22 forms.
Multiple grassroots poverty alleviation officials said that these forms existed to meet different standards set by different levels of government. The county, the city, and the province each had their own standards, and the province even had its own template. Therefore, whenever there was a policy adjustment, everything had to be recalculated, refilled, and resubmitted.
Poverty registration was meant to be an effective way to identify poor households, but because of constant policy changes and uneven execution capacity among grassroots cadres, most effort ended up being spent on procedure rather than substance. “Behind every new plan comes an urgent notice, making already complicated poverty alleviation work even more convoluted,” a Shaanxi county-level poverty alleviation official told Caijing.
The State Council Poverty Alleviation Leading Group Office issued a notice calling for the timely correction of formalism and similar tendencies in poverty alleviation work on October 25, 2016, which included reducing display boards, unnecessary inspections and evaluations, forms, and wall charts. The notice demanded that officials make full use of information technology to strengthen data management for poverty alleviation and reduce printed forms; it also strictly prohibited the production of large-scale display boards, campaign maps, or picture books solely to impress inspection visits.
In rural areas at the front line of poverty alleviation, where most young people had left to work elsewhere, village cadres tended to be older and less educated. As a result, in villages with large poor populations, everything from initial household surveys to on-site verification and the multi-level democratic review process fell on their shoulders.
To help poverty alleviation officials effectively grasp the relevant policies, the Yulin Leading Group for Poverty Alleviation compiled “The Targeted Poverty Alleviation Knowledge Handbook” in April 2017. The 87-page handbook explains 66 policy concepts, including the “One Prioritization”, “Two Assurances and Three Guarantees”, “Four Conscientious Requirements”, “Five-Pronged Poverty Alleviation Measures”, “Six Precisions”, “Eight Pronged Poverty Alleviation Measures”, “Nine Red Lines”, and “Ten Iron Rules”, with the “Ten Iron Rules” section alone spanning 10 pages.
One poverty alleviation official said bluntly that targeted poverty alleviation was a good policy, but at the grassroots level, the number of forms and the frequency of inspections and evaluations at every level just kept increasing. An informed source said Yulin had more than 90 different forms related to poverty alleviation alone. From June 23 to 25, 2017, in order to finish entering data, the Mizhi County Poverty Alleviation Office rented out most of the county’s internet cafes, so that the poverty alleviation officials could work through the night to input records.
A township official said that to meet policy requirements, every piece of information about a poor household had a corresponding form, covering family background, cause of poverty, income, and expenses. Income alone was broken into seven or eight categories—even a gift of a few eggs from a relative had to be converted into income.
Shaanxi’s 2017 poor household verification process mandated a strict procedure, which included public announcement of the process, initial information gathering, household verification, democratic review, two rounds of public disclosure, filing and review, information collection, data entry and cleansing, and the production of a “targeted poverty alleviation household information card” for each household. A township Party Committee Secretary explained that this round of data verification was equivalent to “turning over and starting over”, requiring a comprehensive survey of more than 20,000 villagers across the entire township. As the work had to follow the strict procedure with every stage documented and filed, one can only imagine how large the workload was.
In order to meet the deadline, officials across the township went without a single day off for more than a month. Then, just as the data was submitted to the Yulin Poverty Alleviation Office, the provincial supervision team urgently halted the process, ordering a fresh round of identification with higher standards for removing households from the list. Afterwards, the information collection forms were revised again, rendering all previous forms void and forcing everyone to start over from scratch.
A Rectification Campaign within the Poverty Alleviation Campaign
On June 19, four officials at the Mizhi County Poverty Alleviation Office were dismissed from their posts simultaneously. They were Ma Huiping, the office’s director, and deputy directors Liu Rong, Huo Rujiang, and Liu Zhonghua.
An informed source said that before Ma Huiping and the others were dismissed, Mizhi County Party Committee Secretary Wang Guozhong had already been criticised at a Yulin official meeting for “inadequate rectification work in poverty alleviation”. The source added that since the launch of nationwide targeted poverty alleviation, Mizhi County’s performance had repeatedly ranked near the bottom in spot checks.
More top leaders of several other counties and cities were also disciplined or dismissed following Mizhi County. On June 8, 2017, the Shaanxi provincial government held a province-wide video conference at which Mao Wanchun, Deputy Secretary of the Shaanxi Provincial Party Committee demanded “high-quality completion of rectification work and targeted poverty support” to secure the “turnaround battle” and get into the top tier of the national annual assessment. The meeting also required that, ahead of the national poverty alleviation inspection, Shaanxi first carry out cross-city inspections among its own municipalities.
Cities across Shaanxi formed inspection teams and deployed them to conduct cross-checks the next day. The team assigned to inspect Yulin City came from Ankang. When it left Yulin on June 18, it submitted an evaluation list of problems covering the city’s 12 counties and districts, spanning 20 pages. On June 19, the Yulin Poverty Alleviation Leading Group Office forwarded the list to each county, requiring full rectification by June 30.
The evaluation list revealed a series of problems in Mizhi County’s poverty alleviation work. For example, the poor village of Mahuyu had failed to meet the standard for exiting poverty status, with a poverty rate of 6.5 percent, exceeding the 3 percent ceiling. Besides, drinking water remained a problem, with ten poor households reporting the tap frequently ran dry for about ten days, forcing them to carry water manually.
There were also problems with inaccurate information collection—household heads mis-registered, and family composition not matching with the household registration or actual family size. In Baijiagou Village, for instance, poor villager Wu Zhengwei had been mistakenly registered as “Wu Zhengxiong”, and identity information for all three other family members was also incorrectly recorded.
Regarding the implementation of key initiatives and poverty alleviation policy, as of June 15, health-related data for Mizhi County’s impoverished population had not yet been fully verified. Construction of resettlement housing was slow, relocation and occupancy rates were low, and housing arrangements for some poor households remained undetermined.
However, a Mizhi poverty alleviation official questioned Mahuyu Village’s drinking-water issue being on the list. The official explained that the township had already made arrangements months earlier, but because the newly drilled well had a low water volume, they had to select a new site for re-drilling. Since well-drilling falls under the jurisdiction of the county Water Resources Bureau, it takes time for the township government to submit applications level by level.
A month before this, Yulin had also deployed 12 supervision teams to conduct public and private inspections across counties and districts, checking whether the targeted poverty registration policy had been properly publicized, whether identification procedures were being followed, and whether village-assigned staff were present and on duty. The resulting report revealed that Mizhi County suffered from “a single, undifferentiated poverty support strategy, without tailoring to the needs of individual households”. Among the poor households inspected, the poverty subsidy was uniformly 5,000 yuan; poverty alleviation through business development in every case was “buying sheep”; agricultural support in every case was “buying a small tiller”—a compact farming machine.
The report also listed other problems. Some villages allocated poverty quotas by fixed proportion, inflating the number of poor households in certain villages. Also, in some townships, village cadres had never been trained on or briefed about new poverty alleviation policy; neither town and village cadres nor ordinary villagers knew the discipline-inspection hotline number, leaving many residents unaware and not understanding the new policies. Finally, some village Party secretaries had never fulfilled their duty rosters and had been absent from their posts for long stretches.
In response to these findings, the Mizhi County Commission for Discipline Inspection and Supervision Bureau began holding the relevant units and individuals accountable and issuing public notices countywide. By that time, Ma Huiping, the County Poverty Alleviation Office director who was later dismissed, had already received a formal reprimand.
On June 28, the Yulin Poverty Alleviation Leading Group Office issued a notice designating poverty alleviation as the top priority for all work. The Leading Group’s director role was to be held by Dai Zhengshe, who also simultaneously served as the Municipal Party Committee Secretary. Under the notice, all previously scheduled official transitions, training sessions, on-site meetings, and evaluation activities in Yulin were suspended. Any special circumstances requiring such activities would require prior approval from the Poverty Alleviation Leading Group before being carried out.
The next day, the Mizhi County Party Committee Office also issued an urgent notice, canceling weekends off until the conclusion of the State Council’s inspection tour, with a compensatory day off to be arranged afterward. One township poverty alleviation official said they had already been operating on a twenty-four-seven schedule. However, disciplinary action was hard to avoid, as any small misstep could be flagged and punished during spot checks conducted by inspection teams at every level, at any time.
(Source: Shaanxi Provincial Poverty Alleviation Office)
The immense pressure faced by the grassroots cadres stemmed from strict demands passed down from above. Documents obtained by Caijing show that, as of the end of 2016, there were 1.0572 million registered poor households and 3.1672 million registered poor individuals counted by Shaanxi’s official statistics. To meet the central government’s requirement of poverty eradication, Shaanxi issued its 13th Five-Year Plan for rural poverty alleviation in October 2016, specifying that by 2020, the entire province’s rural poor population and poor counties would be lifted out of poverty. As there were only four years remaining to achieve full poverty eradication under this schedule, and the Shaanxi government had already been summoned for talks by the central government, the pressure only intensified, driving Shaanxi to escalate its poverty alleviation push.
The Shaanxi Daily reported on the poverty alleviation goal set by the Mizhi County Party Committee and county government. According to the report, their goal was that all 92 poor villages and 37,000 poor residents in Mizhi County would be stably lifted from poverty by 2017, with the entire county reaching a “moderately prosperous society” by 2019. This messaging aligned with Yulin’s own targets. As early as July 2015, Yulin had already set the goal of leading the way out of poverty within three years and achieving a fully moderately prosperous society within five.
In October 2016, the Shaanxi provincial government issued “The Implementation Suggestions on Exiting Poverty Status”, offering a one-time incentive of 10 percent of the previous year’s provincial special poverty alleviation project funds (minimum 3 million yuan) to counties and districts that exit poverty status on schedule, and 30 percent (minimum 5 million yuan) to those that exit ahead of schedule. An informed source told Caijing that Shaanxi had originally set poverty eradication deadlines of 2018 for Yan’an and 2019 for Yulin, but both cities later moved their own targets up to 2017 on their own initiative.
Yulin’s aggressive timeline was not without resources behind it. In comparison with other cities in the province, Yulin held a clear advantage in poverty alleviation funding. In 2016, Yulin’s GDP reached 277.305 billion yuan, ranking second in the province, with total fiscal revenue of 48.78 billion yuan and cumulative fiscal poverty alleviation spending of 915 million yuan. “If even Yulin can’t eradicate poverty, there’s little hope for anywhere else in the province,” the source said.
Poverty Alleviation through Business Development Is No Easy Task
In this round of targeted poverty alleviation, five main measures were adopted: boosting the economy to create more jobs for the disadvantaged, relocating those living under adverse natural conditions, providing ecological compensation for the poor, developing education in poor areas, and securing basic needs through social security. Poverty alleviation through business development is seen as a way to cut off the root causes of poverty and has received particular emphasis from local governments.
Mao Wanchun, deputy secretary of the Shaanxi Provincial Party Committee, praised the collective-economy model of Zhaojiamao Village in Yuyang District, Yulin, during a video conference on May 25, 2017. The defining characteristic of the Zhaojiamao poverty alleviation model is that it makes good use of the village’s locational advantages to develop tourism. At the same time, it pushes forward a collective-asset reform, so that villagers hold shares in the collective economy. These measures have raised villagers’ incomes collectively.
However, replicating the Zhaojiamao model is not easy. In Jiafotang Village, Hu County, Xi’an, 48 village representatives jointly registered the Xi’an Wanhua Ecological Agritourism Farm Co., Ltd. (Wanhua Agritourism) to redevelop the Taiping Wanhua Mountain scenic area, providing jobs for 46 local laborers, including 16 disabled and low-income residents. Although the two villages pursued similar development models, their outcomes could not have been more different. From its founding, Wanhua Agritourism commissioned a third party to do environmental assessments, and completed “The Geological-Hazard Evaluation Report”, “The Flood-Impact Evaluation Report”, and “The Soil- and Water-Loss Impact Evaluation Report”. But as of this writing, approval had still not been granted, despite having been submitted to the Xi’an Qinling Government Office. As a result, necessary land-use paperwork was never completed. Caijing later found out that under the 2008 Regulations on Ecological Protection of the Qinling, Shaanxi, land below 1,500 meters in elevation was designated for only moderate development. The area developed by Wanhua Agritourism sits between 550 and 700 meters in elevation. This placed it within the moderate-development zone under the Regulations.
On June 6, 2017, the Xi’an Special Campaign against Illegal Land Use Leading Group issued a supervisory order requiring Hu County’s government to immediately suspend the Wanhua Agritourism project, with resumption conditional on approval from the Qinling Government Office, and to impose penalties in accordance with the principle of “addressing both the matter and the people responsible”.
Caijing also learned that Guanping Village in Hu County, Xi’an also encountered difficulties in poverty alleviation through business development. It had earlier promoted mushroom cultivation as a poverty relief industry. However, as market demand was not properly assessed, many poor households failed to profit and instead lost money. The case of Guanping Village is not uncommon.
One poverty alleviation official said that small-scale, household-based business development efforts in mountain villages lacked the capacity to generate sustained income. Meanwhile, cooperative models often lacked genuinely capable entrepreneurial leaders and couldn’t do proper market risk management. As conflicts between villagers and officials escalated, many villages were reluctant to apply business development funds, leaving large amounts of poverty alleviation funds sitting unused.
In order to speed up the disbursement of poverty alleviation funds, Yulin established a time-limited settlement system, which did produce progress in digesting the remaining funds. As of May 10, 2017, the twelve counties and districts of Yulin had 343 million yuan in unspent poverty alleviation funds from the four levels of government finance, a decrease of 184 million yuan from the figure on April 20.
However, for Fan Desheng mentioned at the start of this article, who had completely lost the ability to take care of himself, the policy of poverty alleviation through business development was not effective. As his son and daughter were both still in school, the entire family of four depended solely on the income of his wife, Zhou Shengfang. But Zhou Shengfang was fully illiterate and had never worked outside the home, let alone taking part in business development programs.
A poverty alleviation official told Caijing that households lacking labor capacity should be separated out from the poverty alleviation framework altogether and had their basic livelihoods guaranteed through the social welfare system instead. In the case of the village where he worked, the economy was backward, the natural conditions were harsh, most young people had left, and those who remained were essentially the elderly, the sick, and the disabled. There were almost no children in the village at all. As a result, the average age of permanent residents exceeded 55. For these particular groups which lack labor capacity, poverty alleviation itself was an intractable problem.
The distinction between the minimum livelihood guarantee (dibao) system and poverty alleviation is that dibao is a social welfare system, while poverty alleviation is meant to help lift poor areas and poor households out of poverty through economic development and production expansion. In 1986, in order to target poverty more effectively, the Chinese government decided to invest fiscal funds, and used state banks to give out supplementary discounted loans, so as to focus on supporting 331 poorest counties nationwide. Poverty alleviation agencies were established at every level of government, tasked with allocating special funds, formulating preferential policies, and pursuing an “economic development-oriented” approach to poverty alleviation. After 31 years, hundreds of millions of people have been successfully lifted out of poverty.
Relative to poverty alleviation policy, China’s dibao system got a later start. In 1997, the State Council required all cities at the county level and above, along with towns where county governments were located, to establish a minimum livelihood guarantee system for urban residents within two years. The development of a rural dibao system actually predates the urban one. However, it was slowed by the constraints of traditional rural collective-welfare thinking and the effects of rural tax-and-fee reform. It was not until 2003, after breakthroughs in the urban dibao system, that the Ministry of Civil Affairs began redeploying efforts to build a rural dibao system.
In 2005, Shaanxi began implementing a rural minimum livelihood guarantee system, subsequently issuing standards for identifying dibao households along with corresponding regulations. Households headed by orphans, widows, or people who were disabled or chronically ill made up the majority of dibao beneficiaries.
Shaanxi began merging the rural dibao standard with the poverty alleviation standard in 2016, a policy it termed the “merging of the two lines”. Under the new standard, the minimum rural dibao guarantee was raised to 3,015 yuan in annual per-capita income, providing bottom-line guarantees for those who have partially or fully lost the capacity to work, and maximizing centralized care for orphaned and disabled poor individuals. This became, for a time, a highlight of the province’s poverty alleviation efforts.
However, an excessively high proportion of dibao recipients raises suspicion of simply “guaranteeing everyone and calling it done”. A central inspection report on Shaanxi found that some cities and counties were not putting in genuine effort on poverty alleviation and were instead taking “shortcuts”: among the “Five-Pronged Poverty Alleviation Measures”, the share relying on “improving social security” was considered too high. In 2016, four counties province-wide exceeded 50 percent, with Yanchuan County reaching as high as 70 percent, reflecting a pattern of simply “guaranteeing everyone and calling it done”.
This original article is reprinted with the author Bai Zhaodong’s permission. The original report can be found in Caijing magazine: https://www.mycaijing.com/article/detail/335981?source_id=40