this post was submitted on 19 Jul 2024
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Let's see what this article from 2020 has to say about China successfully managing to eliminate extreme poverty:

"But the village, one of six in Gansu visited by The New York Times without government oversight, is also a testament to the considerable cost of the ruling Communist Party’s approach to poverty alleviation. That approach has relied on massive, possibly unsustainable subsidies to create jobs and build better housing.

Local cadres fanned out to identify impoverished households — defined as living on less than $1.70 a day. They handed out loans, grants and even farm animals to poor villagers. Officials visited residents weekly to check on their progress.

“We’re pretty sure China’s eradication of absolute poverty in rural areas has been successful — given the resources mobilized, we are less sure it is sustainable or cost effective,” said Martin Raiser, the World Bank country director for China."

Hm...unsustainable you say? Well it's now four years later and it seems things have only continued to get better and better. And not "cost-effective"? Well yes, if you're a capitalist parasite then spending money to lift people out of poverty probably isn't "cost-effective". But the people who no longer have to live in the same miserable conditions they endured before sure seem to think it's been pretty effective for them.

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[–] ksynwa@lemmygrad.ml 30 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

Cool thing is that they don't really show that it is unsustainable. It's just deficit hawk fearmongering of government expenditure.

In the first bit, they even show an example of a positive return on investment where the man sells his cow after having gained two calves from her.

The screeching about housing projects is the more dumbfounding one for me. It's an investment you make as a lump sum upfront and the maintenance costs a fraction of the original. It doesn't really have to be "sustainable" because of that.

The factories receiving subsidies is unsustainable because... no one knows really because they didn't tell why. Are the subsidies drying up? Are the factories operating at a loss? God knows because these journalists definitely don't.

New York Times, the champion of the poor and downtrodden, is very concerned about some people who were poor enough to receive the benefits but didn't. The gaping holes in the emerging social safety net and thoughts of the crippling burden of medical debt keep their good samaritan journalists up at night.

On a serious note, the contradiction between urban and rural development is so far an unsolved problem. I can't say about the specifics of the long term effects of this program because I'm not in the know. It could be less than ideal if they end up relying heavily on direct cash transfers. But the cool thing is that there is no other country in the world that is giving this problem a thought, let alone trying to solve it. The best India can muster up for example is MGNREGA which is pretty shameful. People in rural China are now able to sleep without the fear of their mud roof collapsing on them on a rainy night. No other country in the global south following the capitalist doctrine and IMF stipulated economic policies can claim credit for something remotely close to this. I would like NYT to write about the rural populations of US allied third world countries and see how that turns out.

[–] bennieandthez@lemmygrad.ml 15 points 3 months ago

the ccp is evil because this specific person used to zero interest loan from the goverment to pay for her husband kidney surgery and is burdened with a zero interest loan 😭