Rural China garners NYT front-page story about the nation's costly investment in persistent, deep poverty

Keith Bradsher reports under the headline, "Jobs, Houses and Cows: China’s Costly Drive to Erase Extreme Poverty."  The subhead: "China has spent heavily to help its poorest citizens, an approach that few developing countries can afford and even Beijing may struggle to sustain."

Here's the lede:  

JIEYUAN VILLAGE, China — When the Chinese government offered free cows to farmers in Jieyuan, villagers in the remote mountain community were skeptical. They worried officials would ask them to return the cattle later, along with any calves they managed to raise.

But the farmers kept the cows, and the money they brought. Others received small flocks of sheep. Government workers also paved a road into the town, built new houses for the village’s poorest residents and repurposed an old school as a community center.

And here are the implications for a country where "a migrant worker in a coastal factory city can earn as much in a month as a Gansu farmer earns in a year":  

The village of Jieyuan is one of many successes of President Xi Jinping’s ambitious pledge to eradicate abject rural poverty by the end of 2020. In just five years, China says it has lifted from extreme poverty over 50 million farmers left behind by breakneck economic growth in cities.

But the village, one of six in Gansu visited by The New York Times without government oversight, is also a testament to the considerable cost of the ruling Communist Party’s approach to poverty alleviation. That approach has relied on massive, possibly unsustainable subsidies to create jobs and build better housing.

The high price and lack of sustainability are clues to why the United States government is unlikely to make a major investment of this sort, if not in cows, even in housing and jobs.  

The story quotes Martin Raiser, the World Bank's country director for China, 

We’re pretty sure China’s eradication of absolute poverty in rural areas has been successful — given the resources mobilized, we are less sure it is sustainable or cost effective.

The total cost of the program, thus far, is $700 billion in both loans and grants, over five years.  And that doesn't count "large donations by state-owned enterprises like State Grid, a power transmission giant, which put $120 billion into rural electricity upgrades and assigned more than 7,000 employees to work on poverty alleviation projects."

Here's more on what's happening in some rural reaches of China's Gansu province, with quotes from various residents: 

According to the government’s complicated criteria for determining eligibility for aid, anyone who owned a car, had more than $4,600 in assets or had a new or recently rebuilt house was excluded. People hovering just above the government’s poverty line continue to struggle to make ends meet, but are often denied help with housing or other benefits.

* * *

The party’s campaign-style approach also fails to tackle deep-seated problems that disproportionately hurt the poor, including the cost of health care and other gaping holes in China’s emerging social safety net. Villages provide limited health insurance — only 17 percent of the cost of Mr. Jia’s arthritis medicine is covered, for example. Hefty medical bills can ruin families.

* * *

Despite the challenges, the poverty relief program may have a long-term political benefit that helps to ensure some of it survives. Gratitude for the program seems to be reinforcing the political power of the party in rural areas.

In Youfang, Mr. Zhang was quick to praise not just the poverty program but also Mr. Xi, comparing him to Mao.

“It is good for the country to have Xi Jinping,” he said, “and the national policy is good.”

That's an interesting twist since neither major party in the United States seems to care much about the rural vote, though one party certainly pays more lip service than the other to rural voters.  

By the way, the print headline for this story, which appeared below the fold, was different, "Free Cows?  China Wages War on Rural Poverty."    That language is reminiscent of LBJ's "War on Poverty" from the 1960s.