Poverty alleviation should not be about calculating utilitarian gains; building a new countryside should focus on practical results

With a utilitarian mind and an opportunistic heart, it is very hard to do poverty alleviation well, and it may even tarnish the moral radiance that the very words "poverty alleviation" carry.

Recently, while interviewing in a poor county in western China, I asked grassroots officials whether they were confident about shaking off poverty on schedule, and the answers were surprisingly unanimous: absolutely no problem. After we got better acquainted, one township official gave me a "candid" account: if, after assistance, a poor household's income still falls short of the poverty-alleviation standard, the difference can be made up through coordinated subsistence allowances, so "stable poverty exit" is guaranteed.

The author's interviews found that in some places, poverty alleviation work still shows a fairly serious tendency to care only about a temporary exit from poverty while ignoring the long term.

In the first year of the battle against poverty, progress has been encouraging. However, in the process of implementing the strategies of targeted poverty alleviation and targeted poverty exit, quite a few problems have also emerged. In some places, formalism is fairly serious. Village-stationed officials conduct "commuter-style" and "nominal" assistance, not putting their intelligence into solidly helping poor people get rich through hard work, but into how to "calculate" poor households out of poverty by cleverly working the income accounts. As the main body responsible for targeted poverty alleviation, local governments do not seriously think of ways and take real measures to help poor people increase their incomes and escape poverty, but instead engage in "digital poverty exit" to complete tasks. Some poverty-alleviation actors are seriously utilitarian. For example, some enterprises investing and starting businesses in poor areas ask for preferential treatment and policy support in the name of poverty alleviation, yet in reality they "support the rich, not the poor," while still slapping on labels like "model of helping the poor and relieving distress" and "exemplar of social responsibility." The impulse to snatch off the poverty cap to highlight political achievements also exists to varying degrees in some places: a deeply poor county in western China still has a poverty incidence rate as high as 30%, yet proposed to "remove its cap" this year.

These tendentious and incipient problems in the field of poverty alleviation certainly have many causes. But the author believes that one important reason is that some people lack the reverence they should have for the cause of poverty alleviation and still hold on to utilitarianism. Assistance is linked to a family's daily fuel, rice, oil and salt, to seeing a doctor and going to school. Even after ties are cut, how can those officials who only give people fish but do not teach them how to fish feel at ease when they see that a former recipient has fallen back into poverty because the capacity for development was never cultivated? With such enterprises using poverty alleviation as a pretext while doing nothing substantive to help, how can they bear the moral weight of helping the poor and relieving distress?

To be honest, for an individual, poverty alleviation is destined to be a job with much input and little return. If one must speak of returns, they are mostly the sense of satisfaction at the spiritual level after helping others. For an enterprise, too, poverty alleviation is destined not to be an economic calculation of input and output; the output is more the realization of social responsibility and value. With a utilitarian mind and an opportunistic heart, it is very hard to do poverty alleviation well, and it may even tarnish the moral radiance that the very words "poverty alleviation" carry. Only by holding a heart of reverence and abandoning the idea of calculating utilitarian gains can poverty alleviation truly produce results.

Reverence for poverty alleviation mainly comes from two levels: publicity and education, and institutional development. Helping the poor and relieving distress is a traditional virtue of the Chinese nation, and common prosperity is an essential requirement of socialism. At present, we should do more through publicity and education to build consensus across society that poverty alleviation and doing good deeds are a glorious task and also a noble act. We should do more through forms such as visiting the poor and asking about their hardships to deepen all sectors of society's understanding of and feelings for poor people, and strengthen their sense of responsibility and mission in helping poor people.

In addition to flexible education and guidance, strong institutional safeguards are also needed. In recent years, relevant departments have, with a zero-tolerance attitude, strictly punished corruption in the field of poverty alleviation, applying sustained pressure so that some who "once had ideas" no longer dare to "reach out" and "have no more ideas." In the next step of work, a recall system must be strictly implemented for assistance officials who are not conscientious about poverty alleviation work; responsibility must be strictly pursued for the main bodies that engage in "digital poverty exit"; and for enterprises that enjoy preferential poverty-alleviation policies while carrying out fake poverty alleviation, they must be punished according to law and at the same time placed on a credit blacklist... Only by setting up the "high-voltage line" of institutions can all kinds of poverty-alleviation actors be guided to truly abandon utilitarian thinking, genuinely alleviate poverty, and alleviate the poverty of the truly poor.

The effectiveness of poverty alleviation reflects the moral conscience of a society. Only by truly helping and genuinely assisting with a heart of reverence can the goals of comprehensive poverty eradication and building a moderately prosperous society in all respects be better achieved, and can more positive energy be injected into the whole society.