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When talking about poverty in China, people tend to conjure up images of farmers struggling in remote mountain villages or in the arid lands of the far west. Yet behind their gleaming skyscrapers and rapidly developing infrastructure, China’s cities also hide millions of impoverished residents.
The urban poor numbered 50 million in 2009, or about 8 percent of China’s total urban population, according to the annual Blue Book on China’s Cities, which was published this August by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS).
Luo Peng is one of the urban poor. Out of the window of his room in Maizidian, a wealthy neighborhood in the Chaoyang District of Beijing, he can see upscale office blocks and high-end restaurants serving exotic food, which are patronized by clients in luxury cars.
Luo and his parents share a one-bedroom apartment in a crumbling old building, which, surrounded by brand new luxury condominiums, looks completely out of place.
Ten years ago when Luo was still a student, a serious illness paralyzed his legs and threw his family into poverty. Luo’s mother quit her job to take care of him. From then on, the whole family lived on his father’s salary, a meager 700 yuan ($110) per month. Medical bills swallowed all their savings and left them deeply in debt.
The Maizidian Neighborhood has a residential population of more than 30,000 and is home to 93 officially poor families. Most of the poor families in the area had chronically ill family members, according to a survey conducted by the Institute of Social Development and Public Policy of Beijing Normal University in 2008.
Only about a third of these poor families had medical insurance that covered all or part of their medical expenses. The other two thirds have to borrow money to pay medical bills.
The survey also revealed that only 30 of the poor families had a steady source of income, and their average income was 1,262 yuan ($198) per household, whereas the average monthly salary for a Beijing urban employee in the same period was 3,726 yuan ($584).
New urban poverty
“Urban poverty has become an increasingly salient issue,” said Song Yingchang, a researcher with CASS. “The percentage of urban residents living under the government-set minimum living standard has gradually increased from 1996 to 2009.”
But researchers admit urban poverty is relative.
The poverty line that CASS used to measure urban poverty was an average annual per-capita income of 7,500-8,500 yuan($1,176-1,332).
Wei Houkai, a research fellow with CASS and the lead author of the blue book on China’s cities, said that at present there is no uniform standard to determine urban poverty. Economists usually define absolute poverty in terms of the cost of a specified basket of food and non-food items that are considered “necessary” to meet people’s basic needs, whereas relative poverty is determined in reference to the per-capita expenditure or income of a region.
“Fifty million was obviously an underestimate of the total number of urban poor in China,” said Chen Huai, Director of the Urban and Rural Development and Economic Research Institute of the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development.
“In the past, under the planned economy, people’s incomes were close to the per-capita level, whereas in the market economy the income gap has widened, leaving more people well below the per-capita figure, and resulting in more relative poverty,” Chen said.
Ding Sibao, a researcher with the Shenzhen-based China Development Institute, said that urban poverty is a more difficult challenge to solve than rural poverty as the urban
poor do not have land to farm and feed their families. Unlike the rural poor, few impoverished urban residents migrate to other cities.
According to researchers, urban poverty did not become a major concern in China until the 1990s when China transformed from a planned economy to a market one.
Under the planned economy, when the government assigned jobs to urban residents, the urban poor were mainly orphans, the elderly and the disabled who had no ability to work, no savings or other income source and no relatives to depend on.
However, amid accelerated economic restructuring since the mid-1990s, many poorly performing state and collectively owned enterprises cut production or closed down. As a result, millions of workers have been laid off and their incomes sharply dropped.
According to a study by Zhu Qingfang, a researcher with CASS, there were 8.77 million laid-off workers who were not counted as unemployed in Chinese cities in 1998, while 5.71 million people were registered as unemployed and 0.6 million retirees’ pensions were in default. Assuming these 15 million people each supported one dependent, Zhu estimated that there were 30 million urban poor people at that time. There were also about 1 million urban orphans, elderly and disabled on the welfare roll of the government.
Song said that today the urban poor mainly consist of three groups of people—laid-off workers, migrant workers and fresh college graduates with low-paid or no jobs.
“Most of the poor with urban residence are already in their 40s or 50s, and they will retire in about 10 years,” Song said. In the market economy, the government no longer assigns jobs to urban residents. Many laid-off workers have difficulty finding jobs because of their poor education and age.
China is in the process of rapid urbanization. Every year, 10 million rural people enter cities, but Song said 80 percent of them are poor. China’s urbanization process will continue for another three decades until the rate reaches 75 percent, and the number of urban poor is certain to increase.
Poverty alleviation
Given the scale of the problem, governments at all levels have taken action to alleviate urban poverty.
In the Maizidian Neighborhood, 56 of the 93 officially poor families receive a minimum living allowance from the government, with a monthly payment of about 500 yuan ($77).
The government also insures the residents against serious diseases and unemployment, and some organizations, such as the local women’s federation and labor union, also offer some forms of assistance. “But most of this assistance is not long-term or regular,”said Sun Shouying, a social worker at the Maizidian Neighborhood.
China’s minimum living allowance system was established in the1990s. “At the end of 2010, a total of 23.11 million urban residents received this allowance,” Song said.
Before the 1990s, only those without the capacity to work and with no income or legal guardian were entitled to government relief.
Following massive layoffs from state and collectively owned enterprises in the 1990s, the Chinese Government promulgated in 1999 the Regulations on Guaranteeing Urban Residents’ Minimum Standard of Living.
The regulation stipulates that urban residents with non-agricultural permanent residence whose family’s per-capita income is lower than the local urban residents’ minimum living standard are entitled to the minimum living allowance from the local government.
But Sun said the minimum living allowance provides only marginal assistance to families that are often deeply indebted and coping with serious diseases. The system also places families with per-capita incomes just slightly above the official minimum living standard in a difficult situation as they do not qualify for any government assistance.
Currently, most poverty alleviation NGOs in China do not have programs targeting the urban poor. “The rural poor are easier to target, and poverty alleviation can make a bigger difference,” said Guan Xinping, a professor in the Social Work and Social Policy Department of Nankai University in Tianjin.
The vast majority of urban poverty alleviation programs are conducted by neighborhoods. The Maizidian Neighborhood has launched a number of initiatives to help poor families. In 2007, it launched a Five-Support Program and mobilized local enterprises to offer financial support to needy families, and increase their access to medical services, education and employment.
“So far, the neighborhood has signed agreements with more than 100 enterprises that have promised to donate money or supplies every month,” Sun said.
Luo Peng benefited from the program. In 2008, two companies donated a computer to Luo and agreed to cover his Internet surfing expenses.
With access to the Internet, Luo studied English and computer animation, and opened an online store. He also contributes articles to an Internet portal and now has a monthly income of 1,000 yuan ($154). Although he still has to spend 3,000 yuan ($462) per month on medicine, Luo said that only partial self-reliance had already made him feel better both physically and mentally.
Many other poor families also received assistance from the Five-Support Program. Under the program, Meng Qingjiang, who suffers from hemophilia, a bleeding disorder, receives 300 yuan ($46) a month from a sponsor company in addition to his monthly living allowance from the government. The additional allowance will be paid until Meng’s son graduates from high school.
Ma Jian, who suffers from rachitis, a spine disorder, was a laid-off worker. Under the Five-Support Program, a hotel in the neighborhood offered his wife, who was also a laid-off worker, a job.
“Under the Five-Support Program, many poor families have gradually returned to a normal life,” Sun said.
While the program is extremely successful, a small number of families are found to become dependent on assistance.
“We try to find jobs for those people with the ability to work instead of just giving them handouts,” Sun said.
To help poor residents become financially independent, the neighborhood offers free training and career consulting services to unemployed residents and organizes regular job fairs.
Work incentives
How to protect people from poverty while giving them an incentive to work is a key issue in designing any poverty relief program.
Some minimum living allowance recipients prefer to live on the stipend rather than engage in low status jobs.
Regulations governing the minimum living allowance require local governments to promote employment and self-employment, and encourage working age allowance recipients with the ability to work to participate in community services organized by neighborhoods.
But, the regulations do not set a specific time limit for the payment of the minimum living allowance although it requires a family to report income changes, so that the allowance can be increased, decreased or withdrawn.
“Yet in reality, it is very difficult to stop living allowance payment as it is hard to know the actual incomes of recipient families due to flexible work hours and off-the-book incomes,” said Han Keqing, a professor at the Renmin University of China.
In June 2010, national audit authorities said that 62,900 ineligible households had received 330 million yuan ($52 million) worth of minimum living allowance from 194 district or county governments. About 18 percent of these households owned private businesses, vehicles or more than two apartments.
“The equity and efficiency of the minimum living allowance system will be undermined if it includes ineligible recipients or excludes eligible recipients,” Han said.
The Ministry of Civil Affairs announced last year that eligibility for the minimum living allowance would depend on assets including property, bank deposits, housing and vehicles. Previously, eligibility was determined only by a household’s per-capita monthly income.
However, Han cautioned that the minimum living allowance system alone is not enough to alleviate urban poverty. “The system should be combined with housing, education, medical assistance programs and with employment promotion,” he said.
The urban poor numbered 50 million in 2009, or about 8 percent of China’s total urban population, according to the annual Blue Book on China’s Cities, which was published this August by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS).
Luo Peng is one of the urban poor. Out of the window of his room in Maizidian, a wealthy neighborhood in the Chaoyang District of Beijing, he can see upscale office blocks and high-end restaurants serving exotic food, which are patronized by clients in luxury cars.
Luo and his parents share a one-bedroom apartment in a crumbling old building, which, surrounded by brand new luxury condominiums, looks completely out of place.
Ten years ago when Luo was still a student, a serious illness paralyzed his legs and threw his family into poverty. Luo’s mother quit her job to take care of him. From then on, the whole family lived on his father’s salary, a meager 700 yuan ($110) per month. Medical bills swallowed all their savings and left them deeply in debt.
The Maizidian Neighborhood has a residential population of more than 30,000 and is home to 93 officially poor families. Most of the poor families in the area had chronically ill family members, according to a survey conducted by the Institute of Social Development and Public Policy of Beijing Normal University in 2008.
Only about a third of these poor families had medical insurance that covered all or part of their medical expenses. The other two thirds have to borrow money to pay medical bills.
The survey also revealed that only 30 of the poor families had a steady source of income, and their average income was 1,262 yuan ($198) per household, whereas the average monthly salary for a Beijing urban employee in the same period was 3,726 yuan ($584).
New urban poverty
“Urban poverty has become an increasingly salient issue,” said Song Yingchang, a researcher with CASS. “The percentage of urban residents living under the government-set minimum living standard has gradually increased from 1996 to 2009.”
But researchers admit urban poverty is relative.
The poverty line that CASS used to measure urban poverty was an average annual per-capita income of 7,500-8,500 yuan($1,176-1,332).
Wei Houkai, a research fellow with CASS and the lead author of the blue book on China’s cities, said that at present there is no uniform standard to determine urban poverty. Economists usually define absolute poverty in terms of the cost of a specified basket of food and non-food items that are considered “necessary” to meet people’s basic needs, whereas relative poverty is determined in reference to the per-capita expenditure or income of a region.
“Fifty million was obviously an underestimate of the total number of urban poor in China,” said Chen Huai, Director of the Urban and Rural Development and Economic Research Institute of the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development.
“In the past, under the planned economy, people’s incomes were close to the per-capita level, whereas in the market economy the income gap has widened, leaving more people well below the per-capita figure, and resulting in more relative poverty,” Chen said.
Ding Sibao, a researcher with the Shenzhen-based China Development Institute, said that urban poverty is a more difficult challenge to solve than rural poverty as the urban
poor do not have land to farm and feed their families. Unlike the rural poor, few impoverished urban residents migrate to other cities.
According to researchers, urban poverty did not become a major concern in China until the 1990s when China transformed from a planned economy to a market one.
Under the planned economy, when the government assigned jobs to urban residents, the urban poor were mainly orphans, the elderly and the disabled who had no ability to work, no savings or other income source and no relatives to depend on.
However, amid accelerated economic restructuring since the mid-1990s, many poorly performing state and collectively owned enterprises cut production or closed down. As a result, millions of workers have been laid off and their incomes sharply dropped.
According to a study by Zhu Qingfang, a researcher with CASS, there were 8.77 million laid-off workers who were not counted as unemployed in Chinese cities in 1998, while 5.71 million people were registered as unemployed and 0.6 million retirees’ pensions were in default. Assuming these 15 million people each supported one dependent, Zhu estimated that there were 30 million urban poor people at that time. There were also about 1 million urban orphans, elderly and disabled on the welfare roll of the government.
Song said that today the urban poor mainly consist of three groups of people—laid-off workers, migrant workers and fresh college graduates with low-paid or no jobs.
“Most of the poor with urban residence are already in their 40s or 50s, and they will retire in about 10 years,” Song said. In the market economy, the government no longer assigns jobs to urban residents. Many laid-off workers have difficulty finding jobs because of their poor education and age.
China is in the process of rapid urbanization. Every year, 10 million rural people enter cities, but Song said 80 percent of them are poor. China’s urbanization process will continue for another three decades until the rate reaches 75 percent, and the number of urban poor is certain to increase.
Poverty alleviation
Given the scale of the problem, governments at all levels have taken action to alleviate urban poverty.
In the Maizidian Neighborhood, 56 of the 93 officially poor families receive a minimum living allowance from the government, with a monthly payment of about 500 yuan ($77).
The government also insures the residents against serious diseases and unemployment, and some organizations, such as the local women’s federation and labor union, also offer some forms of assistance. “But most of this assistance is not long-term or regular,”said Sun Shouying, a social worker at the Maizidian Neighborhood.
China’s minimum living allowance system was established in the1990s. “At the end of 2010, a total of 23.11 million urban residents received this allowance,” Song said.
Before the 1990s, only those without the capacity to work and with no income or legal guardian were entitled to government relief.
Following massive layoffs from state and collectively owned enterprises in the 1990s, the Chinese Government promulgated in 1999 the Regulations on Guaranteeing Urban Residents’ Minimum Standard of Living.
The regulation stipulates that urban residents with non-agricultural permanent residence whose family’s per-capita income is lower than the local urban residents’ minimum living standard are entitled to the minimum living allowance from the local government.
But Sun said the minimum living allowance provides only marginal assistance to families that are often deeply indebted and coping with serious diseases. The system also places families with per-capita incomes just slightly above the official minimum living standard in a difficult situation as they do not qualify for any government assistance.
Currently, most poverty alleviation NGOs in China do not have programs targeting the urban poor. “The rural poor are easier to target, and poverty alleviation can make a bigger difference,” said Guan Xinping, a professor in the Social Work and Social Policy Department of Nankai University in Tianjin.
The vast majority of urban poverty alleviation programs are conducted by neighborhoods. The Maizidian Neighborhood has launched a number of initiatives to help poor families. In 2007, it launched a Five-Support Program and mobilized local enterprises to offer financial support to needy families, and increase their access to medical services, education and employment.
“So far, the neighborhood has signed agreements with more than 100 enterprises that have promised to donate money or supplies every month,” Sun said.
Luo Peng benefited from the program. In 2008, two companies donated a computer to Luo and agreed to cover his Internet surfing expenses.
With access to the Internet, Luo studied English and computer animation, and opened an online store. He also contributes articles to an Internet portal and now has a monthly income of 1,000 yuan ($154). Although he still has to spend 3,000 yuan ($462) per month on medicine, Luo said that only partial self-reliance had already made him feel better both physically and mentally.
Many other poor families also received assistance from the Five-Support Program. Under the program, Meng Qingjiang, who suffers from hemophilia, a bleeding disorder, receives 300 yuan ($46) a month from a sponsor company in addition to his monthly living allowance from the government. The additional allowance will be paid until Meng’s son graduates from high school.
Ma Jian, who suffers from rachitis, a spine disorder, was a laid-off worker. Under the Five-Support Program, a hotel in the neighborhood offered his wife, who was also a laid-off worker, a job.
“Under the Five-Support Program, many poor families have gradually returned to a normal life,” Sun said.
While the program is extremely successful, a small number of families are found to become dependent on assistance.
“We try to find jobs for those people with the ability to work instead of just giving them handouts,” Sun said.
To help poor residents become financially independent, the neighborhood offers free training and career consulting services to unemployed residents and organizes regular job fairs.
Work incentives
How to protect people from poverty while giving them an incentive to work is a key issue in designing any poverty relief program.
Some minimum living allowance recipients prefer to live on the stipend rather than engage in low status jobs.
Regulations governing the minimum living allowance require local governments to promote employment and self-employment, and encourage working age allowance recipients with the ability to work to participate in community services organized by neighborhoods.
But, the regulations do not set a specific time limit for the payment of the minimum living allowance although it requires a family to report income changes, so that the allowance can be increased, decreased or withdrawn.
“Yet in reality, it is very difficult to stop living allowance payment as it is hard to know the actual incomes of recipient families due to flexible work hours and off-the-book incomes,” said Han Keqing, a professor at the Renmin University of China.
In June 2010, national audit authorities said that 62,900 ineligible households had received 330 million yuan ($52 million) worth of minimum living allowance from 194 district or county governments. About 18 percent of these households owned private businesses, vehicles or more than two apartments.
“The equity and efficiency of the minimum living allowance system will be undermined if it includes ineligible recipients or excludes eligible recipients,” Han said.
The Ministry of Civil Affairs announced last year that eligibility for the minimum living allowance would depend on assets including property, bank deposits, housing and vehicles. Previously, eligibility was determined only by a household’s per-capita monthly income.
However, Han cautioned that the minimum living allowance system alone is not enough to alleviate urban poverty. “The system should be combined with housing, education, medical assistance programs and with employment promotion,” he said.