Bill Gates, the co-founder of Microsoft and the world’s fifth-richest man, has stated that he thinks that Communist China should be heavily praised for the way it is dealing with poverty.
David Wallace-Wells, a columnist for New York Times Magazine and author of “The Uninhabitable Earth,” stated that progress on poverty around the globe “has been really remarkable.” Making the claim that said progress seemed to be an indicator of “progress in China,” he asked Gates if the overall trend toward the eradication of poverty would continue since China has “sort of finished eradicating real poverty.”
“If you’re allowed to say the truth about things in China, they’ve done a very good job,” answered Gates. “They’re now a middle-income country, in fact, one of the wealthier middle-income countries.”
Back in 2018, one article authored by a professor of economics at Peking University, Beijing, and a then Ph.D. scholar from Peking University claimed that China had first made use of a repressive financial policy in order to try and stimulate the economy.
The article claimed that the People’s Bank of China (PBoC) was still in charge of leading commercial banks’ settings of deposit and lending rates, going on to state that “repressive financial policies have not stopped China from achieving rapid economic growth,” but that “economic growth has decelerated and systemic financial risks have escalated sharply.”
In March of 2021, it was highlighted by NPR that extreme poverty was defined in China as earning less than a total of $2.30 per day in contrast to the suggested World Bank poverty line which sits at $5.50 per day for China’s upper middle-income category.
“China still has around 13% of its population falling below that line, or close to 200 million people,” highlighted Martin Raiser with the World Bank.
John Ruwitch, a correspondent for NPR, who deals with affairs in China, stated, “But for Xi Jinping, proclaiming victory over extreme poverty is propaganda gold.”
Back in February of 2021, it was announced by Chinese President Xi Jinping that his country had outright eliminated all extreme poverty the previous year.
“According to the current criteria, all 98.99 million poor rural population have been taken out of poverty, and 832 poverty-stricken counties as well as 128,000 villages have been removed from the poverty list,” he stated.
Various critics of China have highlighted that the campaign from China to cancel their poverty outright ignored the root cause of more rural poverty: horrendous rural education. Some research has stated that the school dropout rate for rural students sits at roughly 63% before the end of high school, as reported by The Diplomat.
