Ma Yan’s Story – Part 2/2

February 11, 2011

A few days after Ma Yan hears that her family cannot afford to continue her education past fifth grade, Pierre Haski, the French journalist, visited her village.  After seeing the diaries, Haski promised that he would help her continue school then go to a university or even further than that.

Needless to say, after the publication of her diaries, Mao Yan continued on to middle school along with lots of attention from the media.

Ma Yan says that most of the media asked her about her experience at school and she wanted to tell them what it was like so the world would hear of the other poor children that wanted to go to school longer.

Because of that media attention, the students at her elementary and middle schools received offers of help.

That outpouring of interest led to the founding of Children of Ningxia, which will soon celebrate its tenth anniversary. The Children of Ningxia reports that the nonprofit has reached out to more than 2,500 students, scholarships to more than 150 and fourteen have finished their university studies since 2009.

China’s government also abolished school fees through ninth grade but many remote, rural families still struggle to pay for boarding fees.

One student, who is still in school, said she would have been doing farm work if it hadn’t been for Children of Ningxia.

As the Al Jazeera segment of Ma Yan’s Story ends, I thought of the billion people living in poverty around the world.  Less than 10% of those people live in China and this story is only of a few of those people.

Return to Ma Yan’s Story – Part 1

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.

If you want to subscribe to iLook China, there is a “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar.

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China Moving – Part 2/2

January 5, 2011

 To maintain perspective, I will start this segment about poverty in China by citing the CIA World Factbook. The CIA report says that only 2.8% of China’s population lives in “absolute poverty”, while reporting that 12% live in poverty in the US.

India’s listing says 25% live in poverty. The poverty percentage for the United Kingdom (Britain) was fourteen. Zambia, the highest poverty rate I saw was at 86%.

The CIA says, “National estimates of the percentage of the population falling below the poverty line are based on surveys of sub-groups, with the results weighted by the number of people in each group. Definitions of poverty vary considerably among nations. For example, rich nations generally employ more generous standards of poverty than poor nations.

In fact, the 2010 Global Hunger Index says there were 925 million hungry people in the world. The index ranks countries on a 100-point scale, with zero being the best score (no hunger) and 100 being the worst.

China’s score was nine.

Al Jazeera’s Samah El-Shahat says, “The Chinese economic miracle dominates headlines around the world.… The economy there is predicted to grow at 8% up to 2010 and beyond, which is an incredible rate of development.”

To make this happen, people migrated to where the jobs are creating crowded cities and empty villages.

This segment starts out in Sichuan Province on a family farm where bringing in the crop falls to a young girl and her grandmother, Wei Shu Bin.

Wei Shu Bin says the young girl’s parents are away working in the city to earn money—”that is their way of taking care of me.”

In fact, the money sent home from the city has transformed the family’s life in the countryside. Before the parents went away, the family lived in a hut with a thatched roof reminiscent of the middle ages in Europe.

Today, they live in a larger house, but most of the village people are very old or very young because 80% have gone to work elsewhere.

Yang Xui Ying in the village market says, “We keep pigs and grow vegetables for sale in the market. We can support ourselves.”

The reason stated for so many leaving the villages to work in the cities is to provide a better future for their children so they can attend school. However, there is a downside to not having parents at home—the crime rate among rural Chinese teens has gone up.

To build a modern China with improved lifestyles requires sacrifice and hard work. It doesn’t come free.

Return to China Moving – Part 1

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.

If you want to subscribe to iLook China, there is a “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar.

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China Moving – Part 1/2

January 4, 2011

To put this topic in perspective, I’ll start by talking about poverty in the United States.

Business Insider says that 45 million Americans lived in poverty in 2009, which saw the largest single year increase in the U.S. poverty rate since the U.S. government began calculating poverty figures back in 1959.

U.S. household participation in the food stamp program has increased 20.28% since last year, and in June, the number of Americans on food stamps surpassed 41 million for the first time.

One of every six Americans is now being served by at least one government anti-poverty program.

More than 50 million Americans are on Medicaid, the U.S. government health care program designed principally to help the poor, and 20% of children now live in poverty.

The poverty in China you will now read and/or see is not unique. Poverty is a global challenge.

In fact, the World Bank says the poverty rate in China fell from 85% in 1981 to 15.9% in 2005, while in India, 421 million live in poverty.

In this 2007 video, Al Jazeera reported that 150 million people left rural China to find jobs in the country’s rapidly growing cities.

On the outskirts of Shanghai is an illegal shantytown built by migrant laborers. Most migrant laborers are farmers who left their land to find work in the city.

The migrants in this Al Jazeera report collect debris from construction sites, which they sell to recycling centers. Even though these workers earn little, it is more than double what they earned at home.

However, the narrator “does not” mention that on the farm, there may not be much money to buy luxury goods but the home they lived in was rent-free and as farmers, they grew enough food to feed themselves.

The World Bank says that one percent of the world’s population survives by collecting valuable trash and debris as the men depicted in the Al Jazeera video do to earn enough money to survive.

Trash collecting represents the first tenuous step to escape the poverty of rural China.

Professor Shi Ming-zheng, Director of NYU in Shanghai, says the urban people have mixed feelings about the millions of migrant workers flooding into the city to improve their lives.

He says, “On one hand, the urban people feel the migrants are necessary to provide cheap labor. On the other hand, they also despise them because they come from uneducated, poor rural backgrounds.”

For most migrant labors, the only hope for the future is with the children and education is the key.

In fact, China’s government sees the importance of raising the education levels of children so they become useful people for China.

But, according to Al Jazeera, of China’s 20 million migrant children less than half attend school.

Part 2 of “China Moving” will focus on what happens in the countryside when so many people left to find work in the cities.

Learn more about The Urban-Rural Divide in China.

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.

If you want to subscribe to iLook China, there is a “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar.

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The India, China battle to eliminate poverty and illiteracy

November 2, 2010

Chris Devonshire-Ellis wrote a convincing piece at China Briefing that India‘s economic growth would speed past China in the near future. 

He says, “It (India’s) growth rate could overtake China’s by 2013… Some economists think India will grow faster than any other large country over the next 25 years.”

However, there are flaws in that opinion.

Once again, the foundation of this prediction is based on India being a democracy “where entrepreneurs are all furiously doing their own thing” while China is a culture of secrecy and censorship. Chris mentions a few of China’s other flaws too, which China is struggling to overcome.

What Chris doesn’t mention is the difference in poverty and illiteracy between India and China.

India and China both became independent about the same time—China in 1949 and India in 1947.  Due to Chairman Mao’s policies, China suffered horribly from 1949 to 1976 and little progress was made.

For China, most of the progress has taken place in the last three decades. India, on the other hand, has had more than 60 years to solve its problems.

Let’s see what each has accomplished.

The World Bank says, “that China’s record of poverty reduction and growth is enviable. Between 1981 and 2004 the fraction of the population consuming less than a dollar-a-day fell from 65% to 10% and more than half a billion people were lifted out of poverty.”

For India, the World Bank says, “poverty remains a major challenge. According to the revised official poverty line, 37.2% of the population (about 410 million people remains poor, making India home to one-third of the World’s poor people.” UNICEF shows the poverty in India to be 42%.

World Bank studies also established the direct and functional relationship between literacy and productivity on the one hand and literacy and the overall quality of human life on the other.

India’s literacy rate was about 12% when the British left in 1947. Today, literacy is 68%.

In China, literacy is more than 93% with a goal to reach 99% in the next few years.

This means that India has about 800 million literate people competing with 1.2 billion in China.

As for India succeeding, MeriNews.com says, “At a time when we (India) are poised on the threshold of becoming a superpower, the rampant malnutrition and prevalence of anemic children and women to the extent of 48 per cent of the population is a definitive indicator that we have failed as a democracy in ensuring the fundamental requirements of our citizens.”

It appears that China—with its censorship, secrecy and socialist government—has done a much better job of taking care of its citizens.

See the other posts on this topic at India Falling Short and Comparing India and China’s Economic Engines

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. 

If you want to subscribe to iLook China, there is a “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar.

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Poverty and China’s Peasant farmers – Part 3/3

September 12, 2010

In rural China, the peasants do not earn much money.  They live in what the West calls poverty, but they have a home and a roof over their heads.  They are not homeless and seldom are hungry as the poor in India, which is touted as the largest democracy on the earth.

The peasant farmers in China grow most of the food they eat and sell what they do not need as the Amish do today in America and as 90% of Americans did before the Industrial Revolution.

If Chinese peasants, go to school, eat a nutritious diet and have access to basic medical care as China’s central government has promised, health will improve and life spans may surpass urban China where the air pollution is bad.

China is extending the electric grid and improving public transportation so rural China will have access to the same luxuries that urban people have. Before 1980, rural Chinese lived as most Americans did before the Industrial Revolution.

For thousands of years, the backbone of China has always been the peasant farmers and their collective lifestyle. What will happen to China if they all join the consumer oriented middle class?

Rural America must have been a collective culture before the Industrial Revolution. Consumerism and credit cards changed most Americans, except the Amish, into an individualistic culture where “I” is more important than “We”. 

The Amish are still a collective culture with free will to leave and become a modern American consumer. Why don’t they?

See Climbing the Dragon’s Back

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.

If you want to subscribe to this Blog, there is a “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar.

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