A Year for China, a Decade for Any Other Nation!

AS I reviewed Chinese Premier Li Keqiang’s Report on the Work of the Government to the third session of the 13th National People’s Congress in Beijing, it was hard to believe that this report was only the highlights of the government’s work for just one year! Such a diversity of goals and priorities could not be achieved by other nations even in a decade! The most obvious example is how China has handled COVID-19 pandemic.

- BILL BROWN

China, the most populous nation on the planet and, in theory, the hardest place to control a pandemic, has indeed brought the coronavirus under control. Other countries are also opening up, but not because they have controlled the virus but rather simply because they have no hope of controlling it. In the U.S., for example, mayors, governors and the president, as well as local, state and federal judges, are all fighting over whether it is legal or not to quarantine people, or to even make them wear masks. Officials in some places are not even allowed to politely ask people to wear masks, and protestors with semi-autonomic weapons are fighting the oppressive requirement to wear a face mask.

For all its economic might, China is still a developing country, with great needs, yet it never questioned its priorities – people first, then profit. Because China’s priorities were never in doubt, the war against the pandemic never degenerated from a scientific battle into a political squabble. And China succeeded because it used targeted pandemic alleviation measures – even as it is using precisely targeted measures to eliminate poverty.

Another big issue on Li Keqiang’s report was, of course, China’s ending absolute poverty in 2020 with targeted poverty alleviation. Yet again, it is astonishing to me that the most populous nation on the planet with some of the greatest challenges has become the nation to lead the world in battling poverty.

China has been so singularly successful in battling poverty, and the rest of the world has done so poorly, that in 2017, United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said, “China’s targeted poverty alleviation is the world’s only way to help the poor, and reach the goals of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.”