User:Gyrius/Rural society in China

= Area =

Founding of the People's Republic
One of the major avowed objectives of the Communist Party of China (CPC) during its rise to prominence between 1921 and 1949 was the improvement of the standard of living of the average Chinese citizen, the vast majority of whom were rural dwellers. During the pre-1936 period, the CPC played a major role in transforming rural life in areas it influenced or controlled. A major area was land reform, where control was taken from traditional land owners and wealthy peasants, and appropriated to the state, that is, collectivized. China in the early post-1949 period saw increases in mechanization of agriculture, the spread of electricity, running water, and modern technology to rural areas. However, by the late 1950s, much remained to be done. In 1955, rural land in China was deprivatized and became the property of the entire village, or the collective. '''Rural residents became members of the new collective and had equal access to land and village resources. Individual effort was completely disregarded.'''

Mao noted that most benefits were accruing not to the rural areas, where the vast majority of Chinese still lived, and who were the ostensible focus of the revolution, but to urban centers. Chinese rural and urban residents had, and still have two different forms of citizenship, or hukou. The dualistic urban-rural hukou system channeled unequal degrees of resources, including food rations, to urbanites and rural dwellers. The hukou system was initially set up as a “monitoring, not a control, mechanism” '''of population migratory movements. However, when the government recognized that the influx of peasants into cities could cause a serious burden on the economy, the National People’s Congress of China passed a hukou legislation in 1958 strictly controlling citizens’ geographical mobility. Therefore, from the 1960s to the 1990s, it was almost impossible for rural residents to move from the countryside to urban centers. The system was relaxed in the 1990s and many villagers started migrating to the cities looking for better economic opportunities and social status.'''

Collectivization and class status
The first major action to alter village society was the land reform of the late 1940s and early 1950s, in which the party sent work teams to every village to carry out its land reform policy. This in itself was an unprecedented display of administrative and political power. The land reform had several related goals. The work teams were to redistribute some (though not all) land from the wealthier families or land-owning trusts to the poorest segments of the population and so to effect a more equitable distribution of the basic means of production; to overthrow the village elites, who might be expected to oppose the party and its programs; to recruit new village leaders from among those who demonstrated the most commitment to the party's goals; and to teach everyone to think in terms of class status rather than kinship group or patron-client ties.

In pursuit of the last goal, the party work teams convened extensive series of meetings, and they classified all the village families either as landlords, rich peasants, middle peasants, or poor peasants. These labels, based on family landholdings and overall economic position roughly between 1945 and 1950, became a permanent and hereditary part of every family's identity and, as late as 1980, still affected, for example, such things as chances for admission to the armed forces, colleges, universities, and local administrative posts and even marriage prospects.

The collectivization of agriculture was essentially completed with the establishment of the people's communes in 1958. Communes were large, embracing scores of villages. '''The primary function of the agricultural collective was to produce and sell farm goods. Only if one generated enough surplus from agricultural sale can the collective provide social services to its members. However, the system was set up in a way that no one was willing to work extra hard to produce beyond what was required for each of them since all the gain was shared equally among all members. Therefore, an extremely limited amount of social services was available to rural residents.'''

= Sector [Entirely new section added by me] =

TPA Introduction
To lift the poor out of poverty by the end of 2020, the central government established a “targeted poverty alleviation” (TPA) strategy in 2013, which “highlight[ed] the importance of accurate poverty identification, appropriate projects arrangement, accurate use of funds, accurate implementation of helping measures and sending the helping carders to poverty-stricken villages and households to ensure the accuracy of the effect of poverty alleviation.” The logic behind this approach which focuses on accuracy, was that China has already lifted millions out of poverty in the past forty years, and the ones that were still poverty-stricken needed individual targeted attention. Also, the causes of poverty in China were highly diverse and the socioeconomic situations were changing rapidly. No single solution could cover all those highly fragmented and diverse problems.

As conventional poverty-alleviation strategies failed to work, China demanded innovative and targeted anti-poverty methods. Six key aspects of the TPA poverty-alleviation mechanism were proposed to tackle the complex poverty problem. First, the local poverty-alleviation bureaus need to accurately identify the individuals or households who are impoverished using the official poverty line of RMB 2,300 ($362.5) per capita annual net income. Second, selected cadres from superior administrations, organizations and state-owned enterprises are appointed to station in the identified villages to lead their poverty alleviation actions. Third, “targeted assistance projects are to be implemented based on local conditions and needs”. For example, the “Retting Plan” subsidizes vocational training, while the “Micro-credit for Poverty Alleviation” provides discounted loans to those impoverished households for possible business ventures. The fourth aspect gives out specific aid according to each household’s need, especially in the fields of rural infrastructure, tourism, hygiene, education, and family planning. Fifth, social organizations and individuals are encouraged to participate in the poverty alleviation plan and provide specialized assistance. Last, a comprehensive and quantitative system is established to assess the performance of governors and cadres of the poverty-alleviation bureaus.

Challenges of the TPA Initiative
The TPA Initiative is a major political establishment the current administration is pushing through and it is indeed all-inclusive. However, it is not without challenges. To begin with, the poverty identification process can be biased and far from accurate. Most of the times there is no official statistics of peasants’ annual income. The poverty identification relies largely on the village committee’s estimation or the cadres’ personal judgement of the potential households whose per capita income might be below the official poverty line. When there is indeed data, households with a per capita annual income of RMB 2301, which is 1 RMB above the poverty line, are not classified as poor and will not receive aid.

Moreover, as mentioned, the TPA Initiative is a crucial political cause and it has become an arduous task for the government at all levels. As poverty-alleviation goals get distributed to local bureaus, “it seems that the officials involved mostly care about the number reduction to complete their tasks every year.” As a result of the performance evaluation system that is focused on “poverty number reduction”, a phenomenon of passive poverty alleviation emerges where households that are newly labeled as “not poor” fall right back to poverty after the evaluation period ends.