Solemn commitment a promise of gold

Source: China Youth Daily client

China Youth Daily and China Youth Network reporter Li Chenhe

"The battle against poverty has won a comprehensive victory, and China has completed the arduous task of eliminating absolute poverty." On February 25, 2021, General Secretary Xi Jinping solemnly announced at the National Poverty Alleviation Summary and Commendation Conference.

The spirit of poverty alleviation of "working with one heart from top to bottom, fighting with all our might, being precise and pragmatic, pioneering and innovative, overcoming difficulties, and living up to the people" is a great national spirit and the spirit of the times forged by the great practice of poverty alleviation. Poverty alleviation is only the first step, and better days are yet to come. In the days to come, these spirits will inspire Chinese people to continue to strive for a better future.

Fight with all your might

In 2015, Li Xiaoyun, a professor at the College of Humanities and Development of China Agricultural University, entered Hebian Village, Mengban Town, Mengla County, Yunnan Province, to carry out experiments on the comprehensive treatment of deep poverty in Hebian Village.

In his book "The End of Poverty", he wrote that adhering to the leadership of the Communist Party of China, giving full play to the political advantages of concentrating forces on major events, and mobilizing the people of the whole country to participate in the social and cultural advantages of poverty alleviation are one of the basic experiences summed up in China's poverty alleviation work.

Born in the "Three West Regions", although he lived in the county seat, he never took a bath until he was 11 years old. In the small village where his grandparents lived, Li Xiaoyun personally saw the extreme poverty of "the family only wears one pair of pants". Today, the village has been lifted out of poverty.

Since the Eighteenth National Congress of the Communist Party of China, the Communist Party of China has placed poverty alleviation in a prominent position in governing the country, strengthened the party's centralized and unified leadership, made overall plans, and vigorously promoted it. From the party leaders to the vast number of party members and cadres, they are concerned about the poor masses and have the great cause of poverty reduction, and the whole party has the same goal and the same heart from top to bottom.

"Without the attention of leaders, it is difficult to have real results in poverty alleviation." Everyone is accustomed to such dialogues, thinking that they are just some political discourse, but for a person like me who has been practicing poverty alleviation at home and abroad for a long time, it is actually the truth. Li Xiaoyun believes that true political commitment is the most rare political resource for poverty alleviation, and the implementation of such political commitments into action is the most precious governance resource. Whether there is political courage and ability to act to break the structural constraints of the rich and the poor and fundamentally change the distribution pattern between the rich and the poor is the most difficult thing to do in poverty alleviation.

Ahmed Jawad, the press secretary of pakistan's ruling Justice Movement Party, has told the media that China's achievements in poverty alleviation in the past few decades have attracted the world's attention. "China's success in poverty alleviation stems from China's institutional advantages - being able to widely mobilize and unite people in different fields and different classes of society to work for the right direction of national development."

The central government makes overall planning, the province is responsible for the overall responsibility, the city and county grasp the implementation, the work goes to the village, the poverty alleviation is to the household, and the horizontal to the border and vertical to the end. The first-in-command responsibility system, provinces, cities, counties and rural secretaries grasp together... Cadres with good political quality, strong work ability, and practical work style were accurately selected to the grass-roots level to strengthen the construction of the poverty alleviation team, find a way for the poor masses, seek development, and get rid of poverty as soon as possible.

Since the first secretary and village-based task force were selected to poor villages in 2013, by the end of 2020, a total of 255,000 village-based task forces and more than 3 million first secretaries and village-based cadres have been selected nationwide, and nearly 2 million township cadres and millions of village cadres have been working together in the frontline of poverty alleviation.

In 2017, Shao Xiangli, a cadre of the central government to aid Xinjiang, came to Xinjiang from the former China Insurance Regulatory Commission and took the initiative to apply for the task force and first secretary of the task force in Keqingzi Village, Songtak Township, Artush City. They help poor households buy cows, build sheds, harden roads, dock Shenzhen enterprises, guide the leaders of getting rich to invest, and even "brush their faces" to ask for resources, raise money to organize village students to go to Beijing and Shanghai for study. He was tall and tall, and even managed the parents to mediate the contradictions between the mother-in-law and daughter-in-law in the village, and teach the bear children who were not good at learning.

Yang Ning, director of the jiangmen village committee of Anchen Township, Rongshui Miao Autonomous County, Liuzhou City, Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, is a native of Jiangmen and the first female college student village official in the village. After graduating from college in 2010, she was touched by a sentence from the old director and returned to the village. The old director said to her: "There are not many more college students in the city, and there are not many less you, but one more college student in the village is very remarkable." In the past 10 years of taking root at the grassroots level, she has successfully led 326 people from 94 households in Jiangmen Village to lift themselves out of poverty, and the incidence of poverty has dropped from 20% to 0.

Doing our best to fight, giving full play to the advantages of the system, and concentrating elite forces to do great things are both practical wisdom and commitment.

Precise and pragmatic, pioneering and innovative

Li Xiaoyun's poverty alleviation work began in the 1990s. At that time, he was doing specific design, implementation and evaluation of international organizations' development assistance projects in China, and the first question he encountered was: Who are the poor? This issue is the first step in all poverty alleviation efforts.

In 1986, China formulated the poverty alleviation standard for the first time, setting it at 206 yuan, corresponding to the number of poor people of 125 million, mainly to solve the problem of food and clothing. In 2001, when the first ten-year rural poverty alleviation and development program was formulated, the poverty alleviation standard was raised to 865 yuan, corresponding to the number of poor people of 94.228 million. In 2011, when the second ten-year rural poverty alleviation and development program was formulated, the poverty alleviation standard was raised to 2300 yuan (constant price in 2010), corresponding to the number of poor people of 122 million.

In 2013, when General Secretary Xi Jinping visited the eighteen-hole village in Huayuan County, Xiangxi Prefecture, Hunan Province, he first put forward the concept of "seeking truth from facts, adapting to local conditions, classification guidance, and accurate poverty alleviation". Since the poverty alleviation, China's poor population has been identified and withdrawn on a household basis, and the main measurement criteria are "one income" and "two worries and three guarantees".

"One income" means that the annual per capita net income of the household steadily exceeds the current national poverty alleviation standards, and the "two worries and three guarantees" is to steadily achieve the stable realization of no worries about eating, no worries about clothing, compulsory education, basic medical care, and housing safety and security. China's criteria for the withdrawal of the poor population are comprehensive multi-dimensional standards, which not only measure the income level, but also consider the degree of realization of the right to survival and development of the poor population, reflecting the actual situation of China's economic and social development and the basic requirements of building a well-off society in an all-round way. Targeted poverty alleviation not only includes accurate identification and assistance to poor households, but also includes dynamic management of poverty alleviation targets and accurate assessment of poverty alleviation effects.

Years of poverty alleviation work and long-term poverty alleviation experiments in riverside villages have made Li Xiaoyun highly appreciate this standard.

Take the 2012 rural absolute poverty standard of 2300 yuan (constant price in 2011) as an example. Theoretically, it should be the poor whose incomes are below this figure. Even without considering the uncertainty of the source of income and the error of income reporting, farmers with land and shelter and low disposable income may not be poor; on the contrary, farmers without a home, even if their disposable income is higher than 2300 yuan, may still be poor.

"Therefore, in the process of poverty alleviation, the goal of 'two worries and three guarantees' has been added, making it easier to identify who is poor in rural areas." Li Xiaoyun thinks.

Since the mid-1980s, poor counties have been the main targets of poverty alleviation. By 2001, the focus of poverty alleviation shifted to 150,000 poor villages. In 2011, 14 contiguous areas of extreme poverty were identified. Regional development in poverty-stricken areas has long been the main means of poverty alleviation in rural China. How to target the poor so that poverty alleviation projects and investments can truly benefit poor farmers?

"Looking back at China's poverty reduction results in the past 40 years, it can be found that poverty alleviation and development are becoming more and more precise, so that more truly poor people can be benefited." Professor Wang Sangui of Chinese Min University wrote in the book "Chinese Experience in Poverty Alleviation": China's poverty alleviation cause is not overnight, the specific poverty alleviation goals and poverty alleviation tasks at each stage are different, the Chinese government has solved a number of difficult "hard bones" and completed the poverty alleviation tasks set in a stage, and then through the rational determination of poverty standards, planning the scope of key support, and the formulation of specific tasks and measures for the year, a new round of assistance has begun, and the entire poverty alleviation work has shown long-term characteristics. To a large extent, the solution of poverty is compatible with economic and social development, especially rural economic and social development.

Since the 18th National Congress, after eight years of continuous struggle, by the end of 2020, China has completed the task of poverty alleviation in the new era as scheduled, and all 98.99 million rural poor people have been lifted out of poverty under the current standards, 832 poverty-stricken counties have all been removed from the hat, 128,000 poor villages have all been listed, the overall regional poverty has been solved, and the arduous task of eliminating absolute poverty has been completed.

From the system to the specific measures, China's poverty alleviation work has jumped out of the existing "solution path" and created a realistic path of poverty alleviation.

In the book "China, Say No to Poverty", it is written that targeted poverty alleviation is an innovative deployment of China's poverty alleviation strategy in the new situation. On the one hand, in the innovation of the concept of poverty alleviation and development, the "six precise" poverty alleviation requirements are put forward, so that the families who cannot rely on industrial support and employment to help them get rid of poverty will be able to adopt social security poverty alleviation and asset income poverty alleviation, and ensure that poverty alleviation resources are accurately targeted at households. On the other hand, in the innovation of the integration of poverty alleviation paths, the implementation of the "five batches" poverty alleviation path, and the integration of each path, improve the accuracy of poverty alleviation intervention.

In "The End of Poverty", Li Xiaoyun mentioned that from years of poverty alleviation work, he found that when rights and opportunities are unequal, poverty alleviators should not take the moral principle of "respecting the choice of the poor" to encourage the poor to repeat on the original track, but should come up with a different way of living and upgrading the poor to support them.

China's poverty alleviation work has solved the problem of "who to support" through accurate identification and establishment of archives; the problem of "who will support" has been solved by strengthening leadership and building a strong team; the problem of "how to support" has been solved by distinguishing categories and targeted policies; the problem of "how to retreat" has been solved through strict standards and orderly withdrawal; and the problem of "how to be stable" has been solved through tracking and monitoring and preventing the return to poverty.

In the process of poverty reduction, we have also created many poverty reduction methods and practices with Chinese characteristics, such as poverty alleviation workshops, public welfare posts, e-commerce poverty alleviation... Zuo Shu, vice president of the National Rural Revitalization Research Institute of China Agricultural University, believes that these are all programs rich in Chinese wisdom and deserve serious comparison and study by other countries.

This is a road that no one has ever walked, pioneering is courage, innovation is wisdom.

Overcome Difficulties and Live up to the people

From 1958 to 2004, there were two more roads on Chinese soil. One waterway, one mountain road.

In the great changes brought to Chinese society by poverty alleviation, it is not surprising that there are two more roads. And the changes they bring to the local people are like heavenly roads. They are even more poverty alleviation, an epic poem, carved footnotes in a heavy way.

In 1958, Huang Dafa, the former village captain of Caowangba Village (now Tuanjie Village) in Pingzheng Gelao Autonomous Township, Bozhou District, Zunyi City, Guizhou Province, was just elected as the head of the village brigade, and he was bent on breaking the water shortage dilemma of "there are many rocks on the mountain, climbing slopes when going out, wrapping sand and rice all year round, and only having rice soup to drink in the New Year".

The next year, 24-year-old Huang Dafa led the villagers around three mountains to repair canals to drink water, unexpectedly, this cliff on the heavenly road, he walked so bumpy, walked to two sideburns white, walked white haired people to send black haired people. Once this road is taken, it will be 35 years.

A few years later, in 1997, in Xiazhuang Village, Zhuxian Township, Wushan County, Chongqing, Mao Xianglin, director of the village committee, led the villagers to build a sky road in the "sinkhole" located in the karst landform.

From the edge of the pit to the bottom of the pit, it is more than 1100 meters, and there are 108 zigzag turns. Of the 397 villagers, 153 have not been to the county in the past 50 years, 160 have never seen a road, 210 have never seen a car, and more than 360 have never seen TV... Once everyone carried a villager to the hospital for medical treatment, but it took four or five hours to go to the township hospital, and it was half carried, and people could not do it, so they could only carry it back...

Even more tragic figures record the despair of the lives of the people of Xiazhuang Village: more than 60 people fell from the cliff, 15 fell and crippled, 23 fell to their deaths...

The "sinkhole" not only makes people far away from modern civilized life, but even the more than 70 tons of agricultural production and living materials needed for daily life, as well as hundreds of thousands of kilograms of grain and hundreds of pigs produced in the village, have also been stuck on this mountain road, unable to enter and exit. The original sheep gut trail, once round trip, takes 4 days.

For Mao Xianglin and Huang Dafa, what they want to cultivate is not only the Heavenly Road, but also their "Life Road". Only by building this road can we send people out and bring water and industry in.

Mao Xianglin wrapped a rope around his waist and was the first to go down. Huang Dafa took the lead in surveying at an altitude of several hundred meters. When the road is open, a new question arises: how can the old director and the old branch secretary lead the villagers to get rich after the road is opened? For those who do not have high academic qualifications and can only "do it and fool around" at first, this is a completely new topic, and the difficulty is not necessarily less than that of road construction.

No, re-learn; fail, come again!

In 2015, Xiazhuang took the lead in the county to achieve poverty alleviation in the whole village. In 2019, the per capita disposable income of rural residents in Xiazhuang Village reached 12,670 yuan, 40 times that of before the road was built in 1997. The two committees of Tuanjie Village led the villagers to develop Chinese medicinal materials, organic rice, organic sorghum, and fine fruits, raised beef cattle, ecological pigs and bees, and solved the employment of more than 1,100 people, and the per capita annual income exceeded the 10,000 yuan mark. At the end of 2019, Tuanjie Village successfully got rid of poverty.

On March 9, 2021, In Zhuxian Township, Wushan County, Chongqing, Mao Xianglin inspected the road in Xiazhuang Village. Since 1997, Mao Xianglin, secretary of the party branch of Xiazhuang Village, has led the villagers to build an 8-kilometer "heavenly road" along the cliff for seven years. Since then, Xiazhuang Village has opened the door to the outside world and changed the isolation of Xiazhuang from the world. Courtesy of Visual China

According to the World Bank's one-dollar-a-day poverty standard, China has reduced the number of poor people by about 700 million in 30 years. Between 1981 and 2008, the global poverty population fell from 1.5 billion to 805 million, accounting for 90% of the world's poverty reduction during this period.

"The types of poverty in China have a large gradient and are broadly representative." Zuo Shu told the reporter of China Youth Daily and China Youth Network that the types of poverty in China show diversified characteristics, including the poverty of the straight-passing ethnic groups, the poverty caused by the industrialization process in some central and eastern regions, and the poverty caused by the lack of resources in some mountainous areas. Therefore, China's experience in poverty reduction has more reference significance for the rest of the world.

Li Xiaoyun told the China Youth Daily and China Youth Network reporter that the significance of China's poverty alleviation work is not only to lead the people out of poverty, but also to show the world Chinese wisdom and Chinese solutions. "China's solution is to adapt to local conditions and be self-reliant. Chinese choose their own political system, economic development mode, social culture, choose the appropriate way to get rid of poverty in accordance with China's national conditions, adhere to the path of socialism with Chinese characteristics, and achieve the goal of getting rid of poverty in a relatively short period of time. ”

"The most important lesson of poverty reduction in China is that the fruits of economic growth can be shared throughout society." Li Xiaoyun said that for countries with a low level of economic development, if the people cannot benefit from economic growth, economic development will bring huge social problems. "Some countries have achieved economic growth, but they have not been able to alleviate and reduce poverty on a large scale, and it is difficult to achieve a balance between economic growth and increasing the income of the poor." Li Xiaoyun believes that this problem exists in many medium-developed countries. Addressing this problem requires the involvement of strong political parties.

"Through 'development-based poverty alleviation', China has gradually alleviated and eventually eliminated absolute poverty, which is of reference significance for countries at different stages of development." Li Xiaoyun pointed out that China relies on political advantages, breaks through structural constraints, and solves the problem of poverty, which is mainly characterized by unbalanced development after economic growth reaches a certain level.

The battle against poverty has won a comprehensive victory, creating a great miracle in the history of poverty reduction in China and even in the history of human poverty reduction. Living up to the people and seeking happiness for the people is the unchanging original intention and mission of the Chinese communists.