Ting Chak: How China rescued 70% of the world’s poor

The greatest story of humanity in modern times is astonishingly under-reported. As Nury Vittachi says, “if a white person called Steve from Camden Town” worked out a way to rescue astonishing numbers of people from starvation level at high speed, “he would win every prize going”.

But Chinese people did it, so few people know the details of how this breathtaking miracle was done. In what Nury called “my favourite interview of the year”, Tings Chak, who wrote a monograph on the methods used, explains what actually happened—-and what she says is fascinating. Consider the sheer volume of people involved in making it happen — three million folk set to work to locate the poor and create tailored programs for separate villages and even individuals.

This report quotes visually from Robert Lawrence Kuhn’s celebrated documentary made for PBS and CGTN, and from a video of a poverty alleviation worker in a Uyghur village in Xinjiang.

Tings works for a group called “Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research/Dongsheng News”. @t_ings @Dongsheng News @Tri-Continental