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China's dictator cut on welfare subsidies and announced himself an achiever but poverty margin did not shrink, but contrary to that, it expanded due to the increase in the employment rate explains Wei Jingsheng.

Xi Jinping was going to play a shady trick again. In the past few years, he told every year how many people were lifted out of poverty in China. In fact, he tried to put a gold glaze over the face of the Communist regime and take the convenience to prove the greatness of himself. 



Xi's statement is proof of how easy it is to manufacture any number in Communist China. After all, the average Chinese has nowhere to appeal for their grievances, so they have to let Xi get his way.

Therefore, when Premier Li Keqiang heard that Xi would eliminate all poverty in China this year, he could only remind officials at all levels: you must tell the truth. Actually, he just lied again - when did Communist officials ever tell the truth?! 



If the whole money was evenly distributed to poor households in China,
it would lift them out of poverty all at once.

Although the panda huggers in the USA and other Western countries kept saying: China has achieved poverty alleviation, and how great it is, there are too many tricks there. It is not to say that all officials do not care about poverty alleviation, so more than 100 billion Chinese Yuan of poverty alleviation funds are allocated every year. 

If the whole money was evenly distributed to poor households in China, it would lift them out of poverty all at once. Yet why are there so many poor households after decades of poverty alleviation effort? Chinese people understand the systemic tricks.



The first is that corrupted officials collectively live by poor households. The poverty alleviation funds are stripped layer by layer in many names, and when the funds reach the hands of really poor families, there is almost nothing left. For this reason, keeping poor households is the way for officials to make money. 



Corrupted Communist officials collectively live by poor households

A small, poverty-stricken county in the mountainous area can receive hundreds of millions of Chinese Yuan in large-scale construction projects, coupled with exploitation, which nourishes government officials. But how much money would be left for the poor?

Secondly, to create political achievements, the Chinese Communist Party set the poverty standard extremely low. The CCP claimed the poverty standard is only fifty percent of the poverty level defined by the United Nations. According to this Chinese standard, most of the poverty-stricken Chinese families are still extremely poor.




Besides, prices in China are not the third world-level, but many consumer goods prices are higher than in the United States and Europe. In particular, food and housing prices have reached peak levels in the world. It leads to the Premier Li Keqiang question: how do the 600 million Chinese people with an income of less than 1,000 Chinese Yuan live?

Mr. Xi lied to the world that he decreased poverty margin
and he used this lie to cut on budget subsidies for the poor

Even that insignificant leftover of poverty alleviation fund is to be stopped, as Xi Jinping officially announced that there were to be no more households in poverty next year.

From Xi Jinping's perspective, it is a success. He has saved more than 100 billion Chinese Yuan in budget expenses for the stretched finances in China. 

As the saying goes, Mr. Xi killed two birds with one stone earning both fame and fortune at the same time.

China's poverty level is lower by the fifty percent of the United Nations standard.
It means that the Chinese poor are fifty percent poorer than the world-average.

But as the Chinese economy has already been in recession since last year, and it will be this year, the situation is serious. Have Xi Jinping and the Communist regime considered how the poor people would survive? The poverty margin did not shrink, but contrary to that, it expanded due to the increase in the employment rate. 



As Xi Jinping plays politics to such a degree, no wonder someone gave him the title of “the Chief Accelerator of Collapse”.

Many scholars and friends are a little confused: China has been claimed as the second developed economy in the world, why are there so many poor people? And it is not the relative poverty with livelihood security as in the United States, but the absolute poverty without basic livelihood security, which is similar to third world levels. It seems illogical, or as they say in China now, unscientific.

It is indeed illogical according to the law of the balanced distribution of economic results in Western society. But scholars have forgotten that the laws in an authoritarian society and democratic society are different. The greatest advantage of a democratic society is to continuously adjust through democratic procedures to achieve a balanced distribution of national income. This guarantees that the poor can live a decent and reasonable life, instead of the average minimum survival standard as Karl Marx said.

Chinese Communist Party does not desire to raise national income equitably
but raise capital by extreme exploitation of laborers.

The authoritarian society is completely different. Mao Zedong’s Communism guarantees Marx’s standards, which forced people to live like cows and horses. Now, the Communist regime has transformed China into capitalism or authoritarian capitalism, instead of democracy-based capitalism. There is no motivation to adjust national income in an orderly manner, but only a motivation to develop capital by extreme exploitation through sucking up to people’s marrows. It has become the basic policy of this authoritarian capitalism to use its iron fist of autocracy to squeeze the working people and make a small portion of people get rich first.

Western capital, demoralised global investors, who close their eyes to human rights violations
are for-profit maintaining the tyrannical system for the Chinese Communist Party

The same is true about Western capitalists. Without the CCP's authoritarian regime, who would provide them with cheap labor? Maintaining this autocratic and oppressive tyranny is the common need of capitalists all over the world. It is the fundamental reason why the world capitalists have united together in defence of Chinese Communist revisionism.

Wei Jingsheng - writer, Chinese political prisoner, a human rights defender. He is an expert of the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China that gathers representatives from the Parliaments in several countries.
Mr Wei has been one of the pioneers of the modern Chinese freedom and pro-democracy movement. He is an author of "Fifth Modernisation" essay that inspired generations of pro-democracy activists in Communist China. He was unjustly imprisoned for 18 years. He is an author of The Courage to Stand Alone: Letters from Prison and Other Writing. In 1996, Wei Jingsheng was awarded the Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought.

The Wei Jingsheng Foundation kindly granted a permission for a publication of this essay. The Owner editors has slightly edited it.