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Every day a struggle for China's 300 million poor

When she gets sick, Li Enlan, 78, picks herbs from the woods that grow nearby instead of buying modern medicines.

This is not the result of some philosophical choice, though. She has never seen a doctor and, like many residents of this area, lives in a meager barter economy, seldom coming into contact with cash.

"We eat somehow, but it's never enough," Li said. "At least we're not starving."

In this region of southern Henan Province, in village after village, people are too poor to heat their homes in the winter and many lack basic comforts like running water. Mobile phones, a near ubiquitous symbol of upward mobility throughout much of the country, are seen as an impossible luxury. People here often begin conversations with a phrase that is still not uncommon in today's China: "We are poor."

LEFT OUT

China has moved more people out of poverty than any other country in recent decades, but the persistence of destitution in places like southern Henan Province fits with the findings of a recent World Bank study that suggests that there are still 300 million poor in China -- three times as many as the bank previously estimated.

Poverty is most severe in China's geographic and social margins, whether the mountainous areas or deserts that ring the country, or areas dominated by ethnic minorities, who for cultural and historic reasons have benefited far less than others from the country's long economic rise.

But it also persists in places like Henan, where population densities are among the greatest in China, and the new wealth of the booming coast beckons, almost mockingly, a mere province away.

"Henan has the largest population of any province, approaching 100 million people, and the land there just cannot support those kinds of numbers," said Albert Keidel, a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a specialist on Chinese poverty. "It is supposed to be a breadbasket, but there has always been major discrimination against grain-based areas in China. The profit you can get from a hectare of land from vegetables, or a fish farm or oils, is so much more."

Other experts say that Henan and other heavily populated parts of the Chinese heartland are often excluded from the financial support that goes to the coastal areas, and what anti-poverty measures there are have little effect. Typically, residents of these areas say, money intended for them is appropriated by corrupt local officials, who pocket it or divert it to business investments.

OVERLOOKED

Paradoxically, experts say, residents are overlooked precisely because of their proximity to the major economic centers of the east, forced to fend for themselves on the theory that they can make do with income sent home by migrant laborers and other forms of trickle-down wealth.

"Previous poverty alleviation policy focused more on western China, places like Gansu, Qinghai or Guizhou, which were poorer," said Wang Xiaolu (王小魯), deputy director of the National Economic Research Institute, a Beijing nongovernmental organization. "Besides, the situation in the border regions is more complicated, because if things go wrong there, it becomes more than a poverty problem. That's why policy leaned toward them."

In Henan's rural Gushi County, only 73,000 of 1.4 million farmers fall below the official poverty level of US$94 a year, which is supposed to be enough to cover basic needs, including maintaining a daily diet of 2,000 calories.

"We should bear in mind that this poverty standard is very low," Wang said, echoing the view of many Chinese economists.

Many more people in this part of Henan subsist between the official poverty line and the US$1 a day standard long used by the World Bank. Last month, the World Bank's estimate of the number of poor people in China was tripled to 300 million from 100 million, after a new survey of prices altered the picture of what a dollar can buy.
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