Tom Phillips, From Shacks to Des Res: One Village's Great Leap in China's March to the Future; Running water, L-shaped sofas and flatscreen TVs are gracing new homes for some of the beneficiaries of Xi Jinping’s war on poverty. Guardian, Jan 7, 2018
https://www.theguardian.com/worl ... rural-poverty-china
Quote:
"Within the next three years Xi's anti-poverty crusade – which the Communist party leader has declared one of the key themes of his second five-year term – will see millions of marginalised rural dwellers resettled in new, government-subsidised homes. Some are being moved to distant urban housing estates, others just to slightly less remote or unforgiving rural locations.
"By 2020, Beijing hopes to have helped 30 million people rise above its official poverty line of about 70p a day
"The current wave of anti-poverty relocations – 9.81 million people to have been moved between 2016 and 2020 – is taking place across virtually the whole country, in 22 provinces. However, China's western fringes [likely not including Tibet and Xinjiang, which are more factious; see next paragraph], which still lag behind the prosperous east coast, are a focus. Last year Guizhou, one of Chinas most deprived provinces, was aiming to move about 750,000 people from around 3,600 rural locations. More than 1 million people were set to be moved in Gansu, Sichuan and Guangxi, while Yunnan province hoped to move about 677,000 people to nearly 2,800 new villages.
"Experts question Beijing's definition of poverty – the World Bank defines it as someone who lives on less than $1.90 (£1.40) a day – and whether permanently vanquishing poverty is a realistic goal in such a short period. Others believe more emphasis should be placed on fighting urban [as opposed to countryside in faraway places] deprivation.
"The resettlements are the latest chapter in a decades-old Chinese tradition of moving people. Countless millions have been asked – or ordered – to make way for major nation-building infrastructure projects such as the Three Gorges Dam, which displaced about 1.5 million, and the South-North water diversion, which dislodged at least 345,000.
"Wang said poverty-related relocations, while not uncomplicated, were generally 'the most friendly,' as those moved away were mostly allowed to hang on to their old homes and farmlands for a period of time. '[With] all other resettlements they [the government] need something from you: "I need your land. I need you to move so I can build a reservoir. I need to convert your land into an industrial or urban [zone]." For poverty alleviation resettlement, the government doesn't want anything." {brackets original]
Note:
(a)
(i) des res (n; First Known Use 1980s)
https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/des_res
(ii) Wiktionary.com says it is "(Britain, colloquial)."
(b) "Mark Wang 王耀麟, a University of Melbourne professor who studies Beijing’s use of resettlements to fight poverty, attributes Xi’s focus on the issue partly to the seven years he spent in the countryside during Mao’s Cultural Revolution."
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