Feeling Poverty: On the Same Side of the Poor in Baise’s Zhuang Villages

Abstract

“Helping the poor” has been a long-term policy concern in China. In the twenty-first century, the government has created a new slogan stating that China will enter the stage in which all households will live in sufficiency. Amidst the triumphant atmosphere of overcoming poverty, there are still problems that the government has left unresolved, as noted in Chapter 3. First, there is a portion of the population that fails to respond to the call of helping the poor. Second, a significant portion of those who seem to have overcome poverty in the recent past has fallen back to a subsistence economy. Third, another portion of those nascent sufficient communities has developed strong and continuous dependency on the aids provided by the decade-long Helping-the-Poor campaign.