China to relocate around ten million citizens under anti-poverty drive

Beijing: “As the entire nation moves towards prosperity, not even a single person will be left behind.” Chinese President Xi Jinping had said during last year’s annual address of the Communist Party while promising that eradicating poverty would be his top priority. Since becoming President in 2012, Jinping started making efforts to end poverty. However, these efforts have gathered momentum and an ambitious campaign of relocating around millions of people has been undertaken to eradicate poverty.

Ruling parties in China had relocated millions of citizens under various projects in the past too. But this is the first instance of moving people from their place of origin for weeding out poverty. This campaign has been started in all the 22 provinces of China and an ambitious target of bringing more than 3 million citizens above the poverty line, defined by the government, has been set. Sources have said that the focus will be on the western province of China.

A campaign to relocate more than 2.5 million poor citizens to the Guizhou, Gansu, Sichuan, Guangxi, and Yunnan provinces of China has been started. While some citizens are being moved from their original place to new houses built in cities, some others are being moved to newly built modern villages. While relocating 10 million citizens to new places, provisions such as loans, promoting tourism and handing their responsibility to local officials of the Communist Party are being made to fight poverty.

There have been instances of the past where the ruling party has moved millions for their ambitious projects. As many as 1.5 million citizens were forcefully displaced to build one of the biggest dams in the world, the “Three Gorges” dam. And more than 1 million citizens were relocated in 2008 when Beijing hosted the summer Olympics. Also, in 2010, when Shanghai hosted the ‘World Expo’, the ruling party had relocated more than 18 thousand families as well as hundreds of factories.

According to figures from 2014, more than 80 million citizens of China are below poverty line. However this number is based on the information provided by the Chinese government. There is a huge difference in the criteria set by the Chinese government to define the poverty line and the criteria the rest of the world follows to define it. Therefore many experts and analysts have claimed that that number could be as high as 100 million or even more than that.

It is being said that this ambitious ‘Escape poverty’ project of President Jinping is a part of his efforts to make himself a place like that of the founder of the Communist Party of China, Mao Tse-tung.