Yaxue Cao, March 30, 2021 About the sources The main sources for this profile are Mr. Sun Dawu (孙大午)’s speeches, articles and interviews over the years, especially during 2003-2012. They are embedded throughout the text and a fuller list will be appended at the end of Part Two. — Yaxue Cao Part One One day in March 2003, as Sun Dawu delivered a speech in the crowded Shennei lecture hall of China Agricultural University, he was as though the Roman god Janus — at once reviewing the past and peering into the future. “Xushui County [in Hebei Province] is a storied place. You may not be aware of this, but the storm of communization that started up in 1958 began up there. I was born […]
Yesterday we saw that China’s farmers occupy the lowest rung of Chinese society. Today we’ll be looking at why China’s farmers are also at the bottom economically, as we try to answer the question, How poor are Chinese farmers? Officially the average rural income is 5,919rmb, which is about $900. That’s well above the World Bank’s poverty measure of $1/day. However I’m skeptical of these official numbers. A few months ago I helped the charity I work with edit their annual report and found the annual per capita income for some of China’s least developed areas. Now keeping in mind that this charity is working in some of China’s poorest areas, it is still surprising to see that none of these villages were closer than […]
It seems that despite my thorough explanation of why China is not a rich country, even though it has the second highest GDP in the world, major governments have started to cut aid to China. The UK’s department for distributing foreign aid actually had it’s budget grow by 1/3 this year, so it’s not just budgetary reasons for cutting their aid to China. The argument is simple, a country growing 10% a year is not in need of foreign aid.Japan has been a major mover of money in China’s direction, since 1979 they have given over $40 billion to China. They made an argument similar to the UK’s this morning, why should they be giving aid to a country that has a larger GDP than […]
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