In China’s countryside, it is common to find elderly farmers moving from their ancient homes to new developments sprouting up across the land. Houses discovered to be in the path of disasters like floods and landslides, or houses that are simply too old, are being left for new condos closer to industrial or post-industrial jobs.
When Peng Lanhua’s 200-year-old home was designated unsafe to live in by the government, she turned down the opportunity to move to a new community an hour away, and instead, despite her age, or perhaps because of it (she’s approaching 90 and has seen China transformed from being a feudal state occupied by Japan to becoming an economic superpower), she chose to stay in the dilapidated structure.
Were Peng born in a crumbling shack in West Virginia, she might find herself with few prospects. Living with Alzheimer’s on a modest pension and low-income insurance, there would be little hope of fixing up her home, securing basic amenities, and improving her material conditions in her final years.
There is no government or party cadre visiting every trailer home in West Virginia villages to learn how the state and private markets can be mobilized to secure a minimum standard of living. There is no team following up to verify the conditions and see who has been raised out of poverty. However, Peng doesn’t live in Appalachia, but rather a remote village in Guizhou Province, a place that has been a part of China’s poverty alleviation program and was the subject of a recent study carried out by the international left-wing institute, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.
In 2013, China began the “targeted” phase of its long-running poverty alleviation program. Spending $246 billion to build almost 700,000 miles of rural roads, bringing internet to 98% of the country’s poor villages, renovating homes for more than 26 million people, and building new homes for almost 10 million people, China’s Targeted Poverty Alleviation (TPA) program is not tailored solely towards satisfying strict income requirements and quantitative improvements.
Grandma Peng Lanhua in her 200-year-old home, renovated and serviced with electricity, running water, and satellite television in the village of Danyang, Guizhou Province, April 2021. | Xiang Wang / via TriContental
Following the slogan “one income, two assurances, and three guarantees,” the program addresses what’s called Multidimensional Poverty. “One income” refers to raising the daily income above the UN poverty line of $1.90; “two assurances” refers to food and clothing; and “three guarantees” is in reference to access to basic medical services, safe housing with clean drinking water and electricity, and free education.
In 2014, nearly three million cadres of the Communist Party of China were sent throughout the country as part of the program. There were 800,000 tasked with surveying every household, while another two million were tasked with verifying data, removing inaccurate case information, and adding new enrollees.
One cadre was assigned to live in every village to learn what families were going in and out of Multidimensional Poverty and why. Peng was one of the people helped by the program. Her home originally had a mud floor without a toilet or shower, but thanks to TPA, she now she has a concrete floor, an extension with a shower, toilet, and solar heated water, and is provided free internet and TV.
By 2021, the government announced that the almost 100 million people who had remained in extreme poverty in 2013—making up 832 counties and 128,000 villages—had now been raised out of absolute poverty.
Wang Sangui, dean of the National Poverty Alleviation Research Institute of Renmin University, says that tracking the alleviation of even one part of what’s called Multidimensional Poverty requires an extensive amount of data and mobilization from multiple sources. The first question to be answered is who among the country’s 1.4 billion people lives in absolute poverty. Attention then turns to how each of them is to be raised out of poverty. Finally, there is the task of tracking all of these efforts and accounting for their results.
Even just one performance indicator—access to safe drinking water—has multiple data points and factors that must be surveyed and tracked to ensure success in service provision.
“How do you classify drinking water as safe? First, the basic requirement is that there must be no shortages in water supply. Second, the source of water must not be too far, no more than twenty minutes round-trip for water retrieval. Last, the water quality must be safe, without any harmful substances. We require test reports that confirm the water quality is safe. Only then can we say that the standard is met,” Wang told TriContinental.
In Guizhou Province, Peng is just one individual living as one does at her age; her daughter and son-in-law live next door in a home built with government subsidies, and her children are all employed. Liu Yuanxue, the Party cadre for Peng’s village, checks in on Peng and other villagers once a month to see how they’re doing financially and personally. These Party cadre are physically there and connected to the happenings and conditions of the village to provide accurate data on the villages and coordinate assistance based on needs.
But at the Information Center of the State Council Office of Poverty Alleviation, Peng is a name, one of millions, in a network database spanning 30 million poor households in China. The billions of pieces of data associated with them are mobilized like ammunition to wage a decentralized war against poverty. In other words, cybernetics is being used to abolish poverty in China.
The next section “Cybernetics and Socialism” is also interesting and delves into more than just Chinese socialism.
