BEIJING: In downtown Shanghai, a historic alley house with a brick and timber structure often catches the eye of passers-by.
The road where the house is located has turned into a bustling commercial street, but many visitors travel here especially to see the old building. The historic house is where the first national congress of the Communist Party of China (CPC) was held in 1921.
The site, now a memorial for the historic moment, is currently under renovation and will be reopened in the run-up to the centenary of the CPC, the largest political party in the world with over 91 million members, in July.
“The CPC was founded when China was still beset by warlords and the plundering of Western powers… and Marxism was burgeoning among young aspirants with ambitions to save the country from an abyss of tremendous chaos,” said Jin Chongji, a leading expert on CPC history study.
Since the founding of the CPC, China has undergone great changes.
Absolute Poverty Eradication In Most Populous Nation: It is near noon. Jiang Youwen, 53, feeds his chickens and rides his motorcycle to the bamboo grove in Guanjiang Village, Liuzhou City, south China’s Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region. “It’s not yet the season for bamboo shoots, but I need to cut down some old shoots to make room for the new ones, or their quality will slip,” said Jiang while shuttling through the bamboo forests.
Jiang, like most of his fellow villagers, used to live in absolute poverty. Generation by generation, their attempts to improve their lives were frustrated by the rolling hills. Even a walk across the village would require trudging along a 2-km mountainous road. Jiang has eight siblings, making the family the biggest in the village. “But starvation is still the most profound memory of my childhood,” he recalled.
“Our staple food was a small amount of rice mixed with cassava and sweet potato flour, and we only had two meals a day,” he said. “The only luxury lied in a creek, where we caught small fish and shrimp in summer.”
Poverty has troubled China for thousands of years. The CPC’s doctrine is to enable the people to live a better life.
The life of Jiang’s family began to improve after the Party started a reform and opening-up policy and launched rural reforms in 1978 to boost productivity and help hundreds of millions of people shake off poverty.
Over the past 40-plus years of reform and opening-up, more than 700 million people in China have been lifted out of poverty — more than 70 percent of the global reduction in poverty. The poverty reduction went into a new phase when a “targeted policy” was introduced in 2013, which demands local authorities to tailor relief measures to local conditions — a guiding principle in China’s move to eradicate absolute poverty. – Agencies
