Via <a href="http://www.livejournal.com/users/chriswaugh_bj/172519.html" title="chriswaugh: Must read. ESWN is brilliant.">chriswaugh_bj's LJ</a> I arrived at EastSouthNorthWest's recent entry on <a href="http://www.zonaeuropa.com/20050603_2.htm" title="EastSouthNorthWest: The Ten Million Dollar Bentley">poverty in China</a>.  I don't really have a good handle on this subject, because 1) China is so big that I hesitate to draw general conclusions, and 2) I haven't travelled much around China, relative to the amount I think I would have to travel in order to draw any sort of conclusion.  Still, there are a couple of passages I reacted to:

<quote> About this, Zhang Baohua who grew up in the relatively rich Hong Kong sighed: "I cannot help but wonder why even as the country developed economically, the peasants are not receiving any benefits?  Today, Shanghai can claim to be one of the most modernized and developed cities of the world.  Yet nobody cares about the happiness or pain of these peasants and their children ... When people's lives are worth less than those of pigs or dogs, when people's existence has no value, what hope is there for society?"</quote>

<q>Shanghai can claim to be one of the most modernized and developed cities of the world</q>???  This is becoming one of the most trite and overused China-myths in the modern media, and now people are actually repeating it back to the papers that initially propagated it in the first place.  It's especially surprising coming from a Hong Kong resident; when I compare Hong Kong to Shanghai I can always find some areas where the cities are comparable but in the end certain basic differences like average standard-of-living, the conditions of the roads, cleanliness, and zoning/urban planning (oh, planning!) push Shanghai into a very firm second place.  And that's not even comparing it to your average American city.

Also:

<quote>"Our family makes only 200 yuan a year.  I don't have anything to eat for several months of the year, and we have to rely on assistance from the government and others," a Yi tribe woman told me.

There is no fertile land by the mountain.  They live by rearing animals.  Many of the people do not own any cows or sheep.  Fortunately, the local Red Cross and Salvation Army bought cows and sheep for them and then they have some way of making a living and survive.</quote>

I visited some Yi villages on my China trip last summer, even wandering past a Yi funeral, so I have some picture of the people and area they are talking about.  

What I find frustrating about these paragraphs is what I conclude when I run a little thought experiment:  what would happen if the government, Salvation Army and Red Cross had not come in and offered assistance to these people?  Might they have moved to the city and found better housing and jobs?  Would they still be living in sub-freezing temperatures, dressed in rags and walking four hours to school and four hours back?  I'm guessing not.  Hooray for damning these people to poverty through dependence on paltry charitable aid.