Teaching Comparative Government and Politics

Wednesday, August 22, 2012

Move people and end poverty

"Government-sponsored" resettlement is common in China, and doing so to end poverty is one reason. What kinds of government powers and legitimacy are needed to make these policies work?

Two million people to be moved out of poverty

One of the country's poorest provinces plans to solve its poverty problem by moving two million people out of its mountains and barren terrains before 2020.

The project will be one of the largest government-initiated migrations in the country, surpassing the Three Gorges Dam relocation that involved 1.27 million people along the Yangtze River.

Guizhou

Guizhou plans to move the first 100,000 this year, which will cost 1.8 billion yuan (283 million U.S. dollars), according to Chen Yiqin, deputy governor of Guizhou, who said the relocation scheme is key to Guizhou's "final offensive against poverty."…

The province has very few flat areas suitable for growing food… Living conditions are harsh and the environment cannot sustain that many lives in many areas…

[P]eople will be relocated to towns and industrial districts where there will be opportunities. Construction of 181 resettlement communities for this year has already begun…

For this year, each relocated family will be allocated a house no smaller than 80 square meters. The government has also pledged to offer retail stalls to families, officials said…

China has migrated many people, such as in the Three Gorges project...

But the largest relocation was launched in Shaanxi province last year. The government aims to move nearly 2.8 million people out of either poverty-stricken or geological disasters-prone areas in the next ten years.