From “Flood Irrigation” to “Drip Irrigation”

All three of us experienced poverty alleviation firsthand, but our feelings and thoughts about it vary substantially.

Start with me. It all began from the day when Kehai was posted to serve as the first Party Chief in Luozhenbao Village, Yangtousheng Township, Xi County.

The routine is that the higher authorities need to dispatch officials for poverty alleviation and the subordinate departments and institutions take turns to dispatch staff members. As the Editorial Department of Shanxi Literature had made related arrangement, it didn't need to send staff again. For various reasons, however, the Editorial Department had to assign staff members to rural areas for poverty alleviation.

The Editorial Department was just as shorthanded as other departments, but I underestimated the severity of the problem.

I thought that Kehai's role as the first Party chief in the village wouldn't affect his daily work as an editor. It never occurred to me that the job would take all his time and effort. He's totally dedicated to it. In the second week he was posted to the village, he returned to buy pots and pans, a refrigerator, and other necessities. He lived in the rented cave dwellings in the village together with Li Haodong, the deputy director of the Film and Television Department of the Writers Association, who was assigned to be the first Party chief of Zhugan Village, and determined to take foot there. If they need to go back to Taiyuan, the two colleagues and friends would set off on the Friday afternoon by car or bus from Xi County that's over 200 km away. It would be 8 pm or 9 pm when they arrive at Taiyuan. In case of traffic jam, it would be midnight when they arrive. Then, they would meet colleagues or friends during weekends and go to the office to deal with some work on Monday before rushing back to Luobaozhen Village at 10 am to attend the weekly meeting on time. The provincial government required the officials posted in villages to stay at least five days and four nights a week.

It's fine at the beginning, since we could meet Kehai once a week. Over time, we could only meet him once every two weeks and then three weeks. As summer and autumn went by, as the first snow fell on the Loess Plateau, it became more difficult to meet him. Looking at the flying snow outside the window, we all sent WeChat messages to ask him to stay indoors since it would be quite dangerous to walk outside in gully-ridden Xi County on a snowy day. In reply, Kehai would send us an emoji of smiling face and say that he and Haodong are staying in a warm cave with fire burning in the stove.

When we talked about previous work of poverty alleviation in Lan County, Kehai didn't know much about it, since the new round of poverty alleviation is different in many ways.

In the past, institutions were paired with poverty-stricken villages, instead of individual households. Every year, the institutions fight for some projects and raise funds through various channels for the paired villages, ranging from RMB50,000 to RMB100,000. But they didn't know much about the situation of the villagers.

Back then, poverty alleviation was conducted in the style of flood irrigation. The officials posted to the villages for poverty alleviation didn't participate in the rural management or supervise the poverty-alleviating funds and projects, for the sake of effective implementation and early achievements of the funding and projects. It gave rise to the uneven distribution of poverty-alleviating resources, with some going to affluent villages and villagers. The phenomenon was called “elite capture”by sociologists. Flood irrigation is a macro way of poverty alleviation, encompassing all rural areas but with inevitable distortions.

Ten years had passed since then and the new round of poverty alleviation has changed dramatically.

Kehai said that the new round of poverty alleviation made a point of being “precise.” Precise poverty alleviation is opposed to the previous extensive approach. In theory, it is an approach to precisely identify and help poverty-stricken areas and people based on precise management, in line with the actual conditions of these areas and people. As General Secretary Xi put it, it's about solving the issues of “who to support, who and how to conduct poverty alleviation.” To a certain extent, the new round of fight against poverty could be summarized as “micro” poverty alleviation, or micro poverty alleviation under macro-control.

Luozhenbao Village where Kehai served as the first Party chief is 35 km away from Xi County and 28 km further away from Yangtousheng Village where the township government is located. In September 2017, Yang Yao was posted there. The Film and Television Center provided each employee posted there with an electric bicycle. When the electric bicycle was transported to the local area, the villagers laughed, since it's not a good idea to ride it given the winding and bumpy road as well as many slopes and trenches. The first time when Yang Yao rode the electric bicycle to Zhugan Village, the bicycle broke down halfway on the hillside. The horsepower wasn't enough to drive him upward, while he's not strong enough to push the bicycle upward. So he started the motor and ran after the bicycle. As such, a trip of 10 km took him two hours.

The administrative village includes four natural villages, namely Luozhenbao, Xishangzhuang, Lijiayao, and North Wangjiagou, with a population of 932 in 293 households and an arable land of over 8,000 mu (about 533 hectares) for traditional crops like corn, potato and millet. Among 34 CPC members in the village, five of them are under the age of 35, nine with high-school education and six with junior-college education or above. There is a primary school in the village, with 17 students and 15 teachers. After the primary schools in some villages of Yangtousheng Township were merged, teachers gathered here.

Luozhenbao village is remote and close to Yonghe County in the west.

More than 20 officials were stationed in Luozhenbao Village for poverty alleviation, including the work teams assigned by the county education bureau, officials from county government and the first Party chief Kehai. They faced a grueling schedule and an arduous task in poverty alleviation. After Kehai was posted to the village in June 2017, the provincial inspection and supervision of the poverty alleviation work was launched, with the focus laid on precise identification.

In 2014, there were 230 registered poverty-stricken households with 655 people in the village. By 2016, 155 of these households with 443 people were lifted out of poverty. By 2017, most registered poor households got rid of poverty. As we reexamined the situation, we found that many villagers had cars and houses in the county and some even had set up firms. All those people with “two no-worries and three guarantees” shall be removed from the list of registered poor people.

For the reference of the officials working at the primary level, Xi County Government issued a booklet titled “Answers to 100 Questions about Targeted Poverty Alleviation.” The registration of a poverty-stricken household involves nine steps: the application by rural households; household survey; democratic review; review by rural departments; initial screening; public announcement; pairing assistance; formulation of plans; filling out the forms, data entry, net-based operations and data updates.

The registration of poverty-stricken households explicitly excluded several groups of people, including those who own commodity apartment in the town, motor vehicles (except for scooters for the disabled, agricultural tractors and agricultural tricycles), or business firms.

The formula and procedures, instead of being limited to Xi County, apply to precise identification of poor households in the whole province.

In line with the principle of precise identification, the decision to register a poor household can only be made after group discussion at a meeting. As there's a deadline to submit the data and the villagers are busy with farm work during the day, such meetings can only be convened at night. Born into a peasant family, Kehai knew it well and kept a cool head even when the participants arrived one and a half hours late for the meeting in the evening.

The meeting can only begin after all participants arrived, involving a dozen of people from the village Party committee and from the villagers' committee, the villagers' representatives, the stationed work team from the County Education Bureau, and the officials from the county government. They ran through the list of registered poor households one by one and made convincing arguments about whether to remove a poor household from the list.

Despite detailed rules and regulations, there were inevitable problems in the implementation, which made the data update in 2007 a necessity. The households who had got out of poverty should be removed from the list while those who sank back into poverty should be added to the list. Such work with precise identification was investigated openly and secretly by the inspection teams at various levels. The inspection teams didn't inform the village officials of their visit and directly inquired the elders they ran into about the situation. They would visit households one by one for investigation and wouldn't overlook any problem.

How is the registration of poor households carried out?

For a start, every poor household is handed out The Handbook on Poverty Alleviation, incorporating the basic information of the poor household, the paired units for assistance and the person in charge, the poverty-alleviating plan, assistance measures, performance log, the dynamic monitoring table for income, as well as evaluation forms for poverty alleviation. All these are in duplicate, with one being filed in the village and the other kept by the poor household. The information is regularly updated. In addition, there is a card for each household, which is called “information card” to be kept by the household, specifying the reasons for poverty, household population, preferential policies, poverty-alleviating measures, income, and other information.

The first Party chief has to chart the policies for poverty alleviation, the village situation, as well as the population and poor households in the village. It could be counted as the most exhausting time in Kehai's career. At the beginning, Kehai had to fill out a massive number of forms for each household, with rare time for rest. As it was in the busy farming season of July and August, villagers spent most of the time out in the field and Kehai had to go to find them one by one to meet the deadline. As the first Party chief, he had a great many more things to worry about than before.

Yang Yao was posted to Yangtousheng Township as a deputy head in September 2017. He was first assigned to lead the program “One Village, One Product” – a poverty-alleviating program through industrial development. With rich experience in grassroots work, he managed his new job well. Following the reform of the official vehicles, the township government had only one official vehicle at disposal. Therefore, Yang Yao went to conduct surveys in villages by bus or bike. He once walked over 5 km to a village. As such, he acquired a thorough understanding of the whole township within three months.

He said that each village has its own problems. Thanks to hard work in reexaminations, supervisions, inspections, and meetings, the problems have been under control. The precise identification and registration of poor households is merely an initial step of precise or targeted poverty alleviation, involving “six precisions” – precise targets, projects, capital use, measures, and specific places and effects. The program of “One Village, One Product” is about the precise project. Yang Yao noted that precise identification is in fact to set up absolute standards of poverty, with a view to making feasible plans for poverty alleviation. Based on precise identification, the poor households were classified into four groups, namely, general poor households, poor households qualified for subsistence allowance, households qualified for subsistence allowance, and the households for Five Guarantees (food, clothing, medical care, housing and burial expenses). Such work specified the targets for the work concerning the other five related aspects, laying the foundation for the transformation of poverty alleviation from “flood irrigation” to “drip irrigation.”

During the interviews, we found that many counties and officials at the grassroots level, including ordinary farmers, had noticed the new round of the fight against poverty was quite different from before.

In the Qikou Town of Lin County, I interviewed Yan Linsen, a savvy peasant in seedlings growing. He told me that the previous poverty alleviation was actually for rural development, providing farmers with access to water, electricity and roads with street lamps. Wells were dug to provide water, fish ponds were built, vegetables were grown under plastic sheets, and many other work was conducted. However, few tangible benefits were actually delivered to the poor households. Many stationed officials in the village complained the farmers' slackness in work or meeting. In fact, it's because of the lack of stimulation.

It hit the point. The “flood-irrigation” and “extensive” poverty alleviation in the past greatly improved the rural infrastructure by providing the people with access to water, electricity and roads, building schools, digging wells and renovating villages. The rural landscape was undergoing changes. However, it was far from enough. As some scholars pointed out, the “flood-irrigation” poverty alleviation in the past targeted relative poverty, in the hope of paving the way for poverty alleviation of poor households and villages by means of improving rural infrastructure, transforming rural industrial structure and renovating the rural landscape. Unfortunately, it paid little attention to absolute poverty related to the people who are incapable of getting out of poverty through normal channels, due to disability, crippling debts for the kid's education, long-term illness, or other reasons. It goes without saying that the flood-irrigation poverty alleviation didn't take these people into account.

It's for sure that poverty is more than an economic issue. Precise identification goes beyond the simple statistic in demographic terms. The reasons for poverty vary considerably, while precise identification of poor households represents one dimension about poverty. Whether it's relative or absolute poverty, extensive or precise poverty alleviation, floor or drip irrigation of poverty alleviation, the top priority is to take effective measures for poverty reduction and deliver effective assistance to the poor people. Just as Kehai and Yang Yao said, it's quite complicated. Despite a myriad of contradictions and problems in the process of “precise” identification, the key instrument of precise poverty alleviation has been finally found after 30-plus years of exploration.

To sum up, the “six precisions” means to precisely identify the poor people, take poverty-alleviating actions and evaluate the measures and effects of poverty alleviation. It still carries profound significance even after over 30 years of poverty alleviation work.