POVERTY: A China Newly Rich and Still Quite Poor

By DIDI KIRSTEN TATLOW
September 2, 2010
On a warm Friday evening in August, more than 400 guests at Vogue China’s fifth anniversary party milled around in the giant atrium of a hip Beijing hotel, gossiping and guzzling Champagne.
Models, including Liu Wen, the first Chinese to walk the runway for Victoria’s Secret, perched on stage in a glamorous opening ceremony that featured a soprano in a fire-engine red gown rising through the air on a pedestal amid showers of bronze confetti.
Then the sophisticated crowd of creative industry and high society types hushed, as the actress Li Bingbing descended from the dais. Ms. Li’s career is flourishing. She stars alongside Hugh Jackman in Wayne Wang’s new movie “Snow Flower and the Secret Fan” and was on the April cover of Vogue China.
As Ms. Li passed by our group, an assistant scrambled to gather the train of her pearl-gray gown. She waved her empty glass in the air. Another assistant leaped to relieve her of it. She smiled and sailed into a blitz of paparazzi.
The atmosphere was gilded and jubilant, in keeping with China’s remarkable rags-to-riches tale of the last 30 years.
These are fairy-tale days, for some, though not all.
Two nights earlier, He Xiongfei, a noted private publisher, had handed me his latest book: “The Good Grain People” by Aisin Gioro Wei Ran.
The book describes the beginning of Mr. Wei’s 25-year project, dubbed “Ten-Thousand Village Journey,” begun in 2006, to visit thousands of villages and document the poverty he sees.
“I’m just one person. I decided that the best thing I could do would be to tell people what’s really going on,” Mr. Wei said in an interview.
In the introduction, Yu Jianrong, a leading rural affairs researcher, notes that Chinese urbanites have little notion of just how poor many farmers are, especially in remote provinces.
There’s plenty of grinding poverty in the book. Yet the vivid details of the farmers’ lives, their humanity and, often, intelligence, make for compelling reading.
We meet, for example, 8-year-old Zhang Chengcheng from Maying village in the western province of Qinghai, whose mother and grandmother are blind from birth.
His father, driven by poverty, left home as a migrant laborer. Chengcheng cares for the rest of the family alone. From early morning he cooks, shops, fetches water and keeps house. When his seemingly endless chores are done, he studies.
Deeply moved, Mr. Wei writes: “If I hadn’t seen with my own eyes what this 8-year-old boy can do, I wouldn’t have believed it. In the cities, how many children’s parents tell them just to study, taking on everything else themselves. This 8-year-old runs a household and cares for two blind people, and he’s still at the top of his class.”
Mr. Wei visits a family of beekeepers in the mountains, who live in terror of inadvertently finding themselves on a toll road, which could wipe out their income. Such toll roads — sometimes illegal — have become common in recent years.
Nearby, in the village of Shenba Donggou, he meets He Laoda, who labored for years, naked because of the heat and filth, pulling carts underground in privately run coal mines, with ropes that cut into his flesh. He made only a few hundred renminbi a year. A stint in the gold mines of Inner Mongolia yielded no wages at all and he ate out of trash cans, before finding a construction site boss who paid him 900 renminbi, or about $130, for working a year. He returned home for the first time in four years, able to give his family 500 renminbi. He kept 100 renminbi for himself.
Said Mr. Yu, the rural affairs expert: “All these years, people have known about rural poverty, but haven’t appreciated emotionally just how bad it is in these remote areas, what it really means for the people affected by it. This book gives us a real, emotional knowledge.”
There’s a palpable sense of social tension in China these days, a shadow side to the triumphalism of its spectacular economic rise. Policy makers and economists frequently single out the by-now glaring rich-poor gap as a key factor. Increasingly, the poor are resentful, and the wealthy barricade themselves in walled compounds, hire bodyguards or send their families overseas.
Official data put the richest 10 percent of Chinese at 23 times richer than the poorest 10 percent. By comparison, the United Nations assesses Colombia’s richest-poorest 10 percent gap at 60.4, the United States’ at 15.9 and Germany’s at 6.9.
A new study suggests the disparity might be even larger.
People are concealing income amounting to a stunning 9.3 trillion renminbi, up to 30 percent of reported gross domestic product, according to the study, sponsored by Credit Suisse and written by Wang Xiaolu, an economist. Eighty percent of that hidden income, it says, is owned by the already-rich and is most likely “illegal or quasi-illegal.”
Factor that in, and some of the Vogue partygoers, most likely among the top 10 percent in terms of income, are about 65 times richer than the poorest 10 percent of rural households, such as 8-year-old Zhang Chengcheng’s.
Mr. Wang said his team found a link between growing economic inequality and China’s political system.
“The facts show that gray income has its origins in the misuse of power and is closely connected with corruption,” the report says.
Mr. Wei isn’t interested in taking pot-shots at China’s rich. He himself worked successfully in business management for years, and his name indicates his descent from the family that ruled China during the last imperial dynasty.
But he is deeply interested in whether people like Chengcheng can make it out of the poverty they were born into.
His next goal is to set up a poverty alleviation foundation. He is talking with several major Chinese corporations about funding.
“Every country is the same,” he said. “There are rich and poor people. We need the rich people to help us develop. There is so much they can do.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/03/world/asia/03iht-letter.html?_r=1