Wang Xiaoli (left), a girl from Taiyuan, Shanxi Province, initiated the establishment of the "Shanxi Angel Assistance and Disability Assistance Center" public welfare organization, attracting more than 300 people with spinal cord injuries to participate (photo taken on October 30, 2019) Photo/ This magazine
With the reform entering the deep-water area, the acceleration of urbanization and the impact of the epidemic, the composition of relatively poor groups in cities has undergone significant changes
Compared with poverty in rural areas, the relative poor groups in urban areas have diverse characteristics and causes of poverty
Solving the relative poverty of cities will be another battle
Urban relative poverty has the characteristics of decentralization, and it is more necessary to solve the problem of "moisturizing and silent" system construction
Wen | "Lookout" News Weekly reporter Guan Qiaoqiao, Xu Haitao, Li Qianyu, Yin Siyuan, Ren Wei
In the city, there is such a special difficult group. They are not low-income households, but they are affected by a combination of factors such as income instability, illness, and low education level, and their quality of life cannot be effectively guaranteed. "Relative poverty" outside the policy pocket is a prominent feature of this group.
For a long time in the past, most localities equated the urban minimum guarantee with the urban poverty standard. In this way, the degree of poverty can be organically connected with the social assistance policy and the effect of policy implementation can be improved. The disadvantage is that there are not many solutions to "relative poverty" and the pertinence is not strong.
Recently, a reporter from "Lookout" News Weekly visited nearly ten provinces, autonomous regions and municipalities across the country to investigate and found that the current composition of relatively poor groups in cities has undergone significant changes, and they are facing problems from employment, medical care, education, housing, social assistance and other aspects.
New challenges are giving rise to new explorations. In grass-roots practice, all localities are launching urban poverty assistance actions in the new era, exploring the path of "tactical adjustment" from the aspects of identifying difficult groups and rescue mechanisms, building an all-round, multi-level, multi-channel, and wide-coverage urban poverty alleviation and relief system, and comprehensively realizing "weak support".
The "relative poor group" that cannot be ignored
When it comes to poverty, many people first think of the countryside. In contrast, there are also relatively poor groups in cities, with diverse characteristics, complex causes of poverty, and difficult to overcome. The reporter recently investigated and found in many provinces, autonomous regions and cities in the eastern, central and western regions that with the reform entering the deep-water area, the acceleration of urbanization and the impact of the epidemic, the composition of relatively poor groups in the city has changed significantly.
Wu Jinliang, 53, has been engaged in waste acquisition with his wife for more than a decade after being laid off, and in the past the two had an income of 3,000 or 4,000 yuan per month, but the family income affected by the epidemic was not stable. "Children who go to high school need 500 yuan per month for living expenses, but fortunately, the house they live in is father's, and they don't have to pay extra fees in addition to water and electricity costs." Wu Jinliang said.
Nowadays, many people in the relatively poor groups in the city are like Wu Jinliang, who are not low-income households, but for a variety of reasons, their lives are poor. The reporter's investigation found that laid-off unemployed workers, workers in special hardship on the job, various low-income groups who have not participated in social insurance and are suffering from diseases, as well as migrant workers with difficulties in life, have become new members of relatively poor groups in the city.
The reporter found that the income level of the "relatively poor groups" is on the edge of the minimum insurance standard, and some of them cannot enjoy the minimum insurance and the assistance and assistance in medical care, education, housing, employment and other aspects, and the quality of life deviation, development pressure is large, and the ability to resist risks is weak.
Most of the relatively poor groups in cities belong to "expenditure-based poverty", most of which are due to illness, disability, schooling and other reasons that cause the rigid expenditure of families to exceed disposable income, but they cannot be included in the scope of the current policy guarantee, forming a new "invisible poverty".
Luo Xiaoxiang, who lives in a western provincial capital city, has taken root in the city after years of hard work. In August 2020, she was diagnosed with breast cancer. The turn of events left her without a steady source of income. "Now our family of three lives in a low-cost house, and the monthly rent plus utility bills are two or three hundred yuan, and each chemotherapy is a big expense." Luo Xiaoxiang said.
Some experts and scholars believe that relative urban poverty includes both material poverty and spiritual poverty, lack of resources, and shortage of services. Zhang Wenhong, dean and professor of the School of Sociology of Shanghai University, said that under the pressure of long-term life, the more obvious the level of relative poverty, the greater the psychological gap between the relatively poor groups in the city.
The "five major difficulties" have formed a common problem
After visiting the relatively poor groups in many cities in the eastern, central and western regions, the reporter found that they generally faced five major problems such as employment, medical care, education, housing, and social assistance.
First, employment stability is weak. Many relatively poor people are unstable in employment, especially in difficult groups with low education, age and lack of skills, and there is widespread "4050" employment anxiety.
Wang Baokun, 53, is from Baiyin City, Gansu Province, with a monthly salary of 1,300 yuan. His son suffers from a first-degree hearing disability and the cochlear implant needs regular upgrades, costing more than 10,000 yuan a year. In order to supplement the family, every day from 2 a.m. to 4 a.m., Wang Baokun has to go to a friend's shop to help, with an additional monthly income of 1500 yuan. Even so, every month is only a balance of income and expenditure, and it still owes 40,000 yuan of foreign debt. "In this situation at home, I wanted to go out and break in, but who knows what the situation is when I go out?" Wang Baokun said.
What makes it difficult to find employment is also "lack of skills". Nong Yanhong in Nanning City, Guangxi Province, whose lover suffers from high blood pressure and uremia, has to dialysis two or three times a week, and there are 80-year-old people at home. "Usually I am at home alone to take care of them. After the husband fell ill, the family once owed more than 200,000 yuan in foreign debt, which was difficult to repay. ”
The reporter's visit found that some urban poor people with the ability to work need to take care of sick family members and children who go to school, and have been unemployed for a long time. Some families rely on the government, relatives and friends to survive, and the debt burden is getting higher and higher.
Second, there is great pressure on medical expenditure. Some relatively poor people have greater pressure on life due to illness, some people are afraid and unwilling to treat people because of the large cost of serious illness and emergency illness, and some people choose private clinics with lower fees for conservative treatment in order to avoid high treatment costs, and even cut off medical insurance.
Hu Xiaoling, a 64-year-old who lives in Nanchang City, Jiangxi Province, had a tumor resection operation a few years ago and could not do heavy work. My 73-year-old wife suffers from polio, blindness in her right eye and limited mobility. "Our pension has risen to more than 4,000 yuan, but it is still not enough." Hu Xiaoling said that after medical insurance reimbursement, nearly two thousand yuan of drug costs will be paid every month, and the cost of water, electricity, gas, television, mobile phone communication costs and other costs is also a large monthly expense. "I used to have to review my body every year, but I haven't been to the hospital for two years, and I'm afraid I'll have to spend money again."
Third, the high consumption of education is difficult to bear. The reporter learned in interviews in many places that in recent years, private education and off-campus training institutions have "risen", and during the 12 years of basic education from primary school to high school, high expenditures such as off-campus training and school selection costs have become a burden on the shoulders of urban families in difficulty.
Taking an ordinary working-class family in a fourth-tier city as an example, a child with high academic performance should maintain a stable grade, and the total cost of the monthly language and English synchronous classes, improvement classes, and evening self-study classes can reach 3,000 yuan, and the expenditure on stationery and teaching aids for half a year can reach 4,000 yuan. If you are admitted to a high-quality private self-funded junior high school, the annual tuition fee is often 10,000 to 20,000 yuan, exceeding the tuition standard of most majors in ordinary colleges and universities.
Fourth, the housing conditions are poor. This reporter recently visited shantytowns, resettlement communities, and urban villages where low-income groups live in Gansu, Guangxi, and other places. These places have narrow and congested roads, low and dilapidated houses, and poor living conditions, which are out of place compared to life in big cities.
Driving along Panshan Road for about 5 minutes from the main road of the urban area, the reporter came to the back street community of Fulongping Street in Chengguan District, Lanzhou City, Gansu Province, which belongs to the urban-rural interface, and most of the communities under its jurisdiction are shantytowns. The backstreet community sewer is a nullah, and residents carry buckets to dump domestic sewage down the slope. In the summer, the smell is unpleasant, and residents mainly rely on burning coal for heating in winter.
Zhang Jigang, 52, and his mother, Li Lanfang, 79, live here. My mother lived in a 10 m2 room, while he lived in the bedroom next door with only one bed. "Although I live in the city, life here feels out of touch with the city." Zhang Jigang said.
Fifth, social assistance is insufficient. When following the mobile rescue vehicle to conduct street inspections, the reporter found that the difficulty of entering the station and returning to the station is the primary problem of social assistance for relatively poor groups in the city. Vagrant beggars often refuse to enter the station, and some of them suffer from mental or intellectual disabilities that make it difficult to return to their place of domicile. Some aid stations have problems such as the total number of stranded people is too high, the proportion of care is too large, and the level of care in care institutions is low.
The difficulty of "repeated rescue and repeated rescue" is also more common. The person in charge of some provincial and municipal aid management stations said that after the rescue targets were sent back to the place of household registration, due to the lack of effective stabilization and resettlement work for the rescued returnees in some local rescue departments and the streets and township communities to which they belonged, many of the recipients returned to the begging places again, or went to other provinces and cities to continue wandering, which increased the mobility of the homeless people and also caused a waste of rescue resources.
It is necessary to build a system of "moisturizing and silent"
"The common point of relief for urban poor groups and poverty alleviation in rural areas is anti-poverty, the difference is that rural poverty is mostly a concentrated and contiguous regional development problem, and large-scale 'corps-style' operations can work." In the view of Su Wenshuai, director of the Department of Support and Support of the Rights and Interests Protection Department of the All-China Federation of Trade Unions, urban poverty has the characteristics of decentralization, and it is more necessary to solve the system construction of "moisturizing things and silent".
The challenges of addressing relative urban poverty include the following:
First, the existing support policies are difficult to form a full coverage of the relatively poor groups in cities, and it is necessary to establish an integrated urban-rural poverty alleviation system. At present, the formulation of urban poverty governance policies in China is mainly based on income level, while for other poverty characteristics of the poor population, the existing targeted policies are few, and scattered in various rules and regulations, and no unified urban poverty governance policies have been formed.
During the investigation and investigation of resource-depleted cities, industrial and mining areas that have closed down and stopped production, and military enterprises in the third-line construction, the reporter found that there is a phenomenon of "four more and four deficiencies" in the urban poor groups here, which is mainly manifested in the fact that there are many reasons for poverty among the masses and insufficient funds for poverty alleviation and poverty alleviation; there are many marginal groups with low insurance and insufficient support policies; there are many old, weak, sick and disabled people, and there are insufficient professional assistance services; there are many laid-off unemployed people and insufficient re-employment ability.
In addition, the treatment of retired workers here is relatively low, the proportion of poverty caused by illness is high, the living conditions of widows and uninsured "family workers" are more difficult, and targeted regional poverty control policies need to be improved.
At the same time, the existing urban rescue system is mostly based on household registration, and at the moment when the urbanization rate is increasing, the number of urban floating population, migrant workers and other groups has increased, and the existing rescue system has exposed some shortcomings.
Interviewed experts said that the current government aid system with the minimum guarantee as the main content is based on household registration status as a defining condition, mainly in administrative areas, but many floating poor people are mainly engaged in manual labor, often where there is work, it is difficult to effectively cover the existing rescue system. Moreover, it is difficult for migrant workers in cities to enjoy the same treatment as urban residents in terms of medical care, education, and old-age care.
Second, information aggregation, resource coordination, and efficiency improvement for relatively poor urban groups also need to be strengthened. The reporter's investigation found that the current urban poverty alleviation and rescue work involves many departments such as civil affairs, human resources and social security, medical care, education, housing construction, trade unions, women's federations, youth league committees, organizations, etc., but the linkage coordination and information sharing mechanism between departments, regions and levels is not perfect, and there are problems such as insufficient integration of rescue forces and low transparency of rescue targets.
"Each department has its own rescue platform and system. You save you, I help me. A grassroots civil affairs cadre in a western city said that information and data between departments have not been effectively shared, and sometimes compared with a person's information, the unit must send a letter to ask the other party to assist in providing information.
Interviewees reported that some departments have the initiative to carry out the relief of urban poor groups, but the synergy of various departments is insufficient. When some departments intervene in the help of the needy people in cities and towns, the bottom number comes from core departments such as civil affairs. In actual assistance, it is mainly based on their respective responsibilities, and the resources are not fully integrated, and it is difficult to help accurately and effectively.
Third, urban poverty control policies are more focused on traditional relief methods, and development poverty alleviation policies are still lacking. The reporter's investigation found that at present, cities mainly solve the unemployment problem of difficult groups through reemployment policies. However, the content of the rescue is relatively single, and it is difficult to fundamentally help the people in need to get rid of poverty.
The interviewed experts believe that the current policy system focuses on relief after the fact, ignores the capacity development and poverty prevention of relatively poor groups, lacks industrial support, relatively poor groups obtain sustainable income, the employment training system is not perfect, and the entrepreneurship support system has not yet been built. The sustainable development of relatively poor groups in cities has yet to be solved, and the effect of poverty alleviation work is not significant enough.
Fourth, the "service-oriented" rescue system still has shortcomings to be filled. Lu Jing, deputy director of the Wulitai Xincun Village Committee of Changcheng Middle Road Street, Jinfeng District, Yinchuan City, Ningxia, said that there are more elderly people, disabled people, seriously ill patients and minors in the relatively poor groups in the city, and the rescue needs have the characteristics of differentiation and specialization. The existing public service systems such as pension, care, health, and mental health are not yet perfect, and the professional social worker team is lacking, which is difficult to meet the deep needs of these groups.
Urban Bailout "Tactical Adjustment"
In order to overcome the relative poverty of cities, various localities have opened "tactical adjustments" for urban poverty alleviation in recent years. In terms of building an institutional mechanism for the urban poor to get rid of poverty and alleviate poverty, many cities have explored ways to make up for the shortcomings of social assistance and people's livelihood.
Li Tingjun from Qingyang City, Gansu Province, went to Yinchuan City in 2006 to earn a living by doing odd jobs, with an average annual income of 20,000 to 30,000 yuan, and his wife worked as a cleaner at the university with a monthly salary of 1,300 yuan. Both husband and wife have economic income, but the daughter's graduate school tuition is more than 10,000 yuan per year, and the monthly living expenses are 1500 yuan, and the family's economic pressure is very heavy.
At the end of 2018, after application, Li Tingjun was identified as a low-income family by the local government and included in the scope of special assistance. From 2019 to 2020, her daughter can receive 8,000 yuan of special assistance for higher education every year. "Basically, my daughter's tuition fees don't have to worry about." Li Tingjun's wife said that this has reduced a lot of burden on the family, "I believe that when the children graduate, life will be better." ”
Ding Wei, deputy director of the Yinchuan Civil Affairs Bureau in Ningxia, said that the establishment of a low-income family assistance system can effectively make up for the shortcomings of the rescue system from a "cliff" to a "slope" type, thus alleviating the contradiction between the concentration of aid and the lack of assistance.
The reporter's investigation found that in view of the different degrees of difficulties faced by low-income families, Guangxi, Ningxia, Shaanxi and other provinces and regions have established expenditure-based poor family assistance mechanisms, low-income family identification and assistance systems, etc., through the connection with the minimum guarantee policy, to fill the shortcomings of the relatively poor groups, promote the rescue policy to gradient, multi-level extension, so that the rescue policy is more warm.
Nanning, Guangxi is led by the civil affairs department, and multiple departments such as medical insurance, health care, education, human resources and social security, development and reform, finance, women's federations, disabled persons' federations, and federations of trade unions are working together to share information and resources, and the combined benefits of the relief of relatively poor groups in cities are emerging.
Ou Bangqing, deputy director of the Nanning Civil Affairs Bureau, said that as of September 2020, there were 70,710 urban people in need in Nanning, of which a total of 69,751 urban poor people participated in basic medical insurance, 62,315 urban and rural residents participated in basic medical insurance, and 7,436 people participated in basic medical insurance for employees. At the same time, in order to further improve the level of urban minimum guarantee, from April 1, 2020, the urban minimum guarantee standard in Nanning has been raised from 690 yuan per person per month to 790 yuan per person.
A number of grassroots workers said that in addition to increasing cooperation and ensuring information sharing between departments, government departments should also learn from the experience and practices of poverty alleviation, formulate reasonable poverty alleviation standards according to the actual conditions of various localities, avoid "one size fits all", and achieve accurate and targeted poverty control.
In the long run, the elimination of relative poverty is also a protracted battle, and it is necessary to continuously tackle tough problems and make long-term achievements in terms of improving urban poverty prevention measures and exerting social forces.
"The popularity of social insurance such as endowment insurance and medical insurance still needs to be further improved, some urban difficult people are not insured when they are young, and as the aging degree of our country continues to deepen, the poverty of the elderly may be one of the problems facing the future." Guan Xinping, a professor at the Department of Social Work and Social Policy at Nankai University's Zhou Enlai School of Government, said that especially for the floating population represented by migrant workers in the city, the popularity of social insurance needs to be improved urgently.
At the same time, a number of interviewed experts said that in the future, it is necessary to effectively promote the reform of the income distribution system and increase the proportion of labor remuneration in the primary distribution, but also to improve the social security system, accelerate the implementation of the national insurance plan, realize the national overall planning of endowment insurance, and improve the insurance system for urban and rural residents' serious illnesses.
In addition, to control the relative poverty of cities, we should also give full play to the advantages of mass organizations in close contact with the masses and guide social forces to participate in social assistance.
Dai Ying, spokesperson and full-time vice president of the Red Cross Society of Jiangxi Province, said that government departments can encourage social work service agencies and social workers to assist social assistance departments in carrying out investigation and evaluation, file visits, and demand analysis through purchasing services, developing posts, providing policy guidance, providing workplaces, and setting up grass-roots social work stations, and providing psychological counseling, resource links, capacity improvement, social integration and other services for aid recipients. At the same time, we should encourage and guide service institutions based on social assistance to set up social work professional posts in a certain proportion to effectively meet the material and spiritual needs of relatively poor groups in cities. ■