I really can’t get enough of seeing nice things in the world, hearing happy stories in lives and witnessing positive changes in places. I do not have a big taste for tragedies like Romeo & Juliet, Hamlet and King Lear, which I never managed to finish watching, just enough of the plots to know what the stories were about.
Changes Brought By the Biden Administration
I liked it very much when Biden offered to help a mother for her sick son to get vaccinated. If Biden ever comes to Berkeley, I would give him two thumbs up in person. I was also happy to learn that the supply of the vaccines has been sped up “over the next month and a half, the two companies have promised to deliver at least three million shots per day — and to accelerate the pace to about 3.3 million per day starting in April.” According to NYT this morning. Finally, the new Secretary of State Antony Blinken also made an excellent point in an interview with a NPR reporter: “Even as we’re grappling with this ongoing problem, we’re doing it in a way that is transparent, that is out there for the entire world to see. And unlike in some other places, we’re not trying to sweep it under the rug,” very true indeed. By the way, if China is really as confident as Xi, Jinping told us so, it would not hide nearly as many things as it does today.
The only thing I feel the US can do better is to have a sense of urgency, like this NYT morning report has quoted a doctor saying: “In the public statements, I don’t hear that sense of urgency.” “‘We should be doing more,’ Jennifer Nuzzo, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins, said. ‘I am kind of surprised by how constrained we’ve been.’ Many vaccine clinics operate only during business hours, she noted. And the government has not done much to expand the pool of vaccine workers — say, by training E.M.T. workers.”
This pandemic has killed more people than the total casualties from WWII for the US, a state of urgency is indeed what the people in this country deserve. The recent blackouts in Texas during the snowstorm also revealed how vulnerable the electricity supply is.
Excellent Real Life Stories of Changes
I was literally in tears — happy tears — when I was watching the Chinese TV drama The Mining Town (山海情 in Chinese), a dramatization of real life stories of how the people — from one of the poorest villages in one of the most poverty stricken counties in China (in the Ninxia Hui Autonomous Region) — changed their lives by migrating the entire village from a mountain locked, arid place to a flat Gobi desert near the capital city of Ninxia.
I started from the TV drama and switched a documentary to learn more about the stories behind. I did not waste much time from doing that. To be honest, some scenes from the documentary were even more striking or shocking. The TV drama focused more on the migrated people, while the documentary more on people stayed in the same place and lifted themselves out of absolute poverty as well as improved their environments.
Again, The Issue of Baseline Trust
I know some would say these are all governmental propaganda, and I agree the propaganda is obviously there for everyone to see. The documentary contained multiple episodes when the villagers praised the party and government policies. Meanwhile, I also do believe changes were there for everyone to see. When I was in China from 2004 to 2010, I visited places myself and saw with my own eyes how dramatic changes had been made in a very short period of time, changes that were deemed impossible before and for thousands of years. We must admit that it is not easy to fake everything in a large scale.
Perhaps I am gullible but sometime I wish people were less cynical. This is what I meant when I say we should have some baseline trust, which really makes the world a better place. It saddens me to see the criticism against Nikki Haley, the former governor and UN Ambassador of the US, who recently openly criticized Trump. Some quickly pointed out that she was just trying to weaken or rule out a potential competitor in the 2024 run for the presidency. But the NYT report was right that “her sharp criticism represented a departure from other Republicans who are believed to be considering running for president in 2024.”
Why can’t we just take her words for it and appreciate the changed attitude toward Trump after January 6th by an important political figure from inside GOP? It’s not like we have too many GOP elites like Haley.
Give People The Fish Vs. Help Them Catch The Fish
Anyway, I borrowed the notion “war on poverty” from Linden Johnson in the 1960s to help people establish the link. The Chinese called it Assistance Against Poverty (扶贫 in Chinese).
The fundamental difference goes back to a famous saying in China: 授人以鱼不如授人以渔, which literally means it is better to teach people fishing than giving them the fish you caught. It is about making sustainable changes by turning people into change agents. China has been doing exactly the former, not the latter.
At the beginning of the TV drama, the first episode showed a young local cadre who just graduated from a community college and joined the county Office of Poverty Assistance. His very first job assignment, together with his supervisor, was to persuade seven households in his home village to return to the migration location. These people only stayed in the migration site for a few days and decided it was enough. They hated the new location: mosquito bites and big sand storms that they never experienced before. None of them would leave the village to return to the new homes this time, despite the talks of the government officials.
Of course, it is important to keep in mind that by staying in the old place, the farmers can receive low income transfer payments from the government, in addition to other benefits more in kind than in cash. For example, the drama showed that the government gave the village some 80 chickens, in the hope that people would raise more chickens to sell the eggs for cash. However, people ate all the chickens rather than raising them for eggs. So that did not work out as planned.
One thing is clear: The Chinese do not have the “protestant work ethic” that to work hard is to honor the God. Without the internal drive, everything reduces to the simple math: Unless migrating to the new location brings more money than the money they could receive by staying in old homes, nobody would bother to move.
Leadership, Leadership & Leadership
That was the crucial time when leadership mattered. The young cadre talked his father into migrating to the new location to set a model for others, and several families decided to go along. This was the time real changes started.
When I watched the documentary, the importance of village leadership was even more prominent. The key leader was the First Party Secretary of the village, a non-native parachuted into the job, whose only mission was to lift the village out of absolute poverty. Like the title character in the TV drama, he too led by examples to get his villagers mobilized for change.
A Partnership Between Farmers & Government
Teaching people fishing skills required joint efforts from farmers and government. The latter did most infrastructure work to make the migration site livable. Most important was to develop an irrigation system that pumped the water from the nearby Yellow River to the new farm land.
The other thing that Beijing did right was to set up inter-provincial coordination. In the TV drama, the coastal (and much richer) Fujian province was paired with the poor inland Ninxia to help the latter grow its economy. Guess what Fujian people did in Ninxia? Many Fujian factories needed factory workers, while many young people in Ninxia had nothing much to do. The two sides then had a happy marriage with migrant workers from Ninxia to be recruited by Fujian factories.
For those staying home, Fujian people also helped them make money even without leaving home. They taught farmers to cultivate mushrooms, with zero interest governmental loans to help farmers build greenhouses. The mushroom business boomed and money started flowing into farmers’ pockets everyday.
Migrant farmers on the other hand had a tough start. They must plant trees surround their new homes in the desert to hold the sand in place rather than in sand storms. The migration location was purposely chosen so that migrant farmers could work in a nearby farm as temporary workers for cash, which they can save to be used for building their new houses in a village of all migrant farmers.
I honestly was expecting the government to pick up the costs for farmers to build new houses, but later the drama explained why that was not the case: Government wanted farmer to build their own new houses so they would be more likely to stay instead of going back and forth between old and new homes, which makes sense if you think about it.
In the documentary the stories were about the same: The first thing that the village leader did was to connect the village residents with tap waters. The cost was entirely paid by the government. The area was now 99% covered by tap water — for the first time in thousands of years, when they always had to walk at least 5 km to get water.
The next thing was to turn farmland into grassland and then farmers switched to raising cattle. Every step of the way, farmers had doubts and reluctance, but the leaders always set live examples and models for others to follow. Being pragmatic people, once they saw the evidences of earning real money, the rest became a piece of cake.
How Xi, Jinping Won My Respect
Everybody knows that Xi (pronounced “She”) has a signature project called “Belt and Road,” but what Xi did to earn my respect was almost entirely by his personal efforts in the so called “Accurate Assistance Against Poverty” or in Chinese, 精准扶贫. I have never met Xi, not even remotely, but one can tell the difference between really caring and pretending to care. I could feel he belongs to the former by putting much thoughts into this project and the number of times he visited poor areas in China. He was serious about bringing changes to people living at the bottom of income level.
This should not be taken as given. China is a hierarchical society and if you are poor, expect little sympathy from anyone else. The fact of the matter was that poor families scattered over different corners of the country and it was so easy to be “out of sight, out of mind.” The job has to be imposed from above, and when Xi himself took it seriously, suddenly everyone else did, at least in appearance if not in earnest.
Now China no longer has a single county designated as “Poverty County” since November 23, 2020. It has uplifted all of its citizens beyond its set ￥2,300 (CNY) per year, or less than a dollar per day poverty line. Of course, critics can always say that’s a low threshold but still, it is an important step in the right direction. When I saw the smiling faces in the documentary and the TV drama, that’s when I had tears.
Honestly, I would vote “Yes” to award Xi the Nobel Peace Prize, although that’s unlikely to happen, given his rotten reputation in the west. On the other hand, if Xi were to be voted out by the party elites, it may not be a bad thing to China — if we could find someone with better vision of the future. My point is that every national leader is a complicated package and our only right way is to treat him or her that way.