Yang Jinfeng’s hands went from using a hoe to chaining delicate thread stitches. “I didn’t know if I could do it because I was never good at crafts and I had broken fingers but it just required patience. I left thanks to this place poverty. Last year I bought a small piece of land and a car,” she says shyly as she stitches up a Buddhist fresco.
Baisha Embroidery Institute, a village in Yunnan province, is one of thousands of initiatives. Chinese eradicated extreme poverty. The success achieved in terms of speed and volume is unmatched. According to the World Bank, two-thirds of its population, roughly 750 million Chinese, were poor in 1990. In 2012 it had 90 million, and four years later it was down to seven. 0.5% of the population.
Chinese President Xi Jinping announced that they had crossed the finish line last year. 75% of global poverty eradication in recent years has come from China, so it is appropriate relativize victory about how it regressed around the world.
centuries old tradition
province Yunnan at the border Thailand and went unnoticed until the first backpackers arrived decades ago at the other end of the bustling east coast. Yunnan epitomizes the legend of Shangrila, with its villages made of trees and stone, its arrogant peaks sunk into leafy valleys and out of reach of the clouds. Its exuberant nature and ethnic diversity make it the most interesting corner of the country. this Gezi of the masses He has already left the old cities of Dali or Lijiang. rough theme parks but it is enough to set aside a few tens of kilometers to find peace.
In Baisha town, they wondered how to take advantage of neighboring tourism and fell into the water. centuries-old embroidery tradition of the naxi ethnic group. During the Qing dynasty, it was customary for serfs from the small Lijiang kingdom to give them to the emperor and mothers’ daughters on the eve of their wedding. Its religious theme was expanded with the arrival of the Han, the Chinese-majority ethnic group, and today the exhibition hall displays dream landscapes, representations of pandas or everyday scenes of the Naxi. The size and skill of the artist determines the price. One million yuan (142,000 euros) costs Buddha’s face on the most noble wall.
Jin Qiu, the monitor, describes a self-sustaining process. “Six years ago, the provincial authorities asked the principal to teach the village women how to embroider. a handful of teachers went to the lost villages in the mountains for several months to teach them the most basic concepts. The best came to the institute to perfect their techniques and returned to their villages to teach the rest.” A dozen women work at the institute, and another 300 women work from home, part-time or full-time.
80,000 million investment
China has invested more in poverty eradication than ever before Wanted to give final impetus to 80,000 million Euros since 2015. He built roads and houses, transferred money to the needy, and relocated millions of Chinese from barren villages to new cities. It also sent 775,000 officials to “map” the country’s poverty and matched each one with needy households to oversee the recovery process.
it is understandable rural provinces noted the greatest popular support for the Government. It wasn’t always like this. Devoting efforts to them was understood as a waste of energy at any cost to Jiang Zemin’s economic growth. His successors, Hu Jintao and Xi, made efforts to alleviate social inequalities and other confusions of that man for himself.
Yan’s family, along with four adults, earned about 20,000 yuan (2,840 euros) a year from rice or corn cultivation and up to 50,000 (7,100 euros) from tobacco. Yan earns 36,000 yuan (5,100 euros) a year from embroidery alone, almost four times what he earns with the best harvest. For five years he combined earth and thread until he left the first. “It was tiring, worked more than 12 hours every day. I embroidered at night and things turned out to be flawed. Now I earn more money and also contribute to the culture of my people. What I am doing will become permanent over time,” he reasons. He charges 50 yuan (7.1 euros).
Under $1.69 a day
Chinese fixes $1.69 per day poverty lineBelow the World Bank’s $1.90. Recently there has been a debate as to whether it should be adapted to the reality of a more mature country, but eradicating poverty is a sensitive political issue.
Prime Minister Li Keqiang recalled two years ago: 600 million Chinese live under 1,000 yuan (142 euros) a monthThis seemed like a surprising attempt to disrupt Xi’s party. On the eve of the convention, ‘Return to Dust’, a movie by Li Ruijun, disappeared from billboards despite its excellent collection. It recounted the tender romance of a peasant couple in a dusty Gansu village, possibly describing their difficulties in more detail than Beijing could tolerate. He is not even spared by the overwhelmed legend, which is absent from European festivals and explains that the hero is happy in the new house given by the government.
China left unfinished business in rural areas and it is possible to argue whether there are several million poor people missing or missing in their accounts. What is certain is that in the last three decades, poverty has never been tackled more and better in the world than in China. It is enough to travel the country today to see the contrast with this bitter suffering.