Our friends at Beijing Today swing by now and then to introduce art and culture in the city.

Starting from the age of 10, Jiangnan Yiling, editor-in-chief of Size Outdoor magazine, traveled with his father to snowy mountains, harsh deserts, Buddhist shrines, and the Tibetan steppe. Last month, he spoke at UCCA about his travels and the inspiration for his charity projects.

A visit to an elementary school in Yushu, Qinghai province changed his life in 2009.

“I was traveling for fun that day. We were driving in the mountains when we bumped into this portable school,” he said.

The “school” was little more than a traveling tent that moved around the plateau to offer classes to local children.

“The contrast between developing regions like Guangdong and Jiangsu and truly isolated areas was simply shocking,” Jiangnan said.

The encounter inspired his documentary: a project in which he spent five to 10 years on the road recording village life and documenting living conditions and boosting awareness of poverty.

Jiangnan has visited nearly 50 impoverished regions since 2010, photographing the conditions and learning from the locals.

For the UCCA lecture, he talked about the 10 most touching places he visited.

His personal stories painted a very different picture of China’s development than the one portrayed in official media.

When Jiangnan revisited Yushu after the quake, he learned about the local government’s wild corruption and its plan to use the disaster to grab more land. He recorded the terrible conditions of the migrants and the struggles of the rescue team, many of whom fell ill due to altitude sickness.

His personal account is raw and unedited, written based on his first impressions rather than digested and refined.

Many people who attended the lecture said they were interested in volunteering as teachers.

“Speaking for myself, I do not support the idea of being a short-term volunteer teacher,” he said. “The more you see, the more you become aware that one person’s ability to make a difference is so small and so limited.”

That feeling is partly why he began the project: awareness is the first step in building a system that can provide real support, he said.

The massive turnover in volunteer teachers carries its own burden for the community, much of which consists of children who are left behind with aging, ailing grandparents as their only caretakers.

Jiangnan said he plans to visit all 468 of the government’s officially recognized impoverished counties. Along the way he will record and publish the contact information of children in need.

Although his projects have several sponsors, the majority of his work is entirely self-funded.

To learn more about Jiangnan’s project or his documentary, you can visit his websites at ngophoto.org or bbs.8264.com.

This post originally appeared in Beijing Today.

Via Beijing Today: “Malipo County in Yunnan Province has been on the poverty list for decades. The county spent 300 million yuan building a university campus in the valley to attract students. But none have ever attended.”

Our friends at Beijing Today swing by now and then to introduce art and culture in the city.

The China Dream is in trouble according to a recent report by The Mirror. The investigative report, published on February 7, said the number of impoverished counties in China rose from 331 in 1985 to 592 in 2012.

This purported slide into poverty runs contrary to three decades of explosive economic growth and seriously clashes with the government’s official reporting of 98.9 million people in poverty nationwide.

But rather than unmasking a hidden class of impoverished citizens, The Mirror’s reporters may have stumbled up one of the nation’s most audacious channels for corruption.

In 1985, the central government put forward a policy that would replace handouts with generous funding for projects intended to “develop the local economy” in China’s poorest counties. The incentive was designed to bring the countryside in line with the nation’s greater market reforms.

Initially, “poor counties” were defined as those where the average annual household income was less than 150 yuan: $51 at the time, or $110 in today’s money.

The nationwide average, by comparison, was 858 yuan per household.

The number of listed counties has grown slowly in the years since. In most years, about 30 counties graduate from the list to be replaced by new developing regions.

On the surface, the policy appeared to be working. In 2012, the government revised the policy and bumped the baseline average household income to less than 2,300 yuan per year.

But the poverty list is based on self-reporting rather than census data, and local officials have a strong incentive to present their communities as ailing to tap into the vast cash reserves of the central government.

Many “poor counties,” especially those along the eastern coast, applied for poverty status to win subsidy money for bogus projects.

An increasing trend in corruption over the last decade resulted in billions of yuan earmarked for good causes to pour into the pockets of county officials.

Hailun County in Heilongjiang province, Lixin County in Anhui province, and Taiqian County and Fengqiu County in Henan province are among the most heinous examples of fund abuse, having directly used poverty relief funds to purchase promotions, erect gaudy government offices and construct lavish homes for local officials.

Little evidence exists that any subsidy money was used as intended.

Taiqian County was awarded an annual budget of more than 80 million yuan in 2011 – a year when its average annual income was 7,200 yuan in the cities and 2,650 yuan in the countryside.

As government officials built themselves luxury apartments and a new massive administrative complex, more than 600 students were left packed into one small dormitory. Their classrooms had no windows to shield them from the elements.

When reporters asked school officials why the classrooms did not have windows, they were told the school could not afford them.

The school was located next to the new government complex.

Wang Jingbo, deputy director of the Chinese Law School, said that the central government is revising its poverty targets to move more wealthy counties off the list in hopes that the funds go where they are truly needed.

“We have to focus our spending on real projects that push development in the right direction,” he said. “This phenomenon can’t be allowed to persist.”

This post originally appeared in Beijing Today.

Authorities in Beijing’s have reportedly used concrete to seal off wells that had served as makeshift homes for migrant workers in a particularly impoverished area in Chaoyang district. Hug China reports:

66-year-old migrant woman Quan Youzhi from Henan province has lived in the well for years. But she will not be allowed to live there any more as Beijing officials have sealed it up with concrete after media attention to this group of well dwellers.

Sorry, back up a second. What do you mean “well dwellers”?

Living in wells is apparently what some people do. Hug China again:

A report by Beijing Morning News on Thursday that several wells in downtown Beijing have been used as home by some old couples and migrant workers for years has caused sensation in China with all major online news portals putting up the story as headline.

…In one well, a couple in their seventies that make a living by begging had lived there for five to six years. In another well, a 53-year-old man with the surname Wang who earns his living by collecting scraps said he had lived there for 20 years to save the bed rent (not apartment rent of course) that normally costs 300 yuan per month in an  area where apartment price has rocketed to 40 to 50 thousand yuan per square meter.

Local residents said more than 20 wells in the area had been used by poor people as homes and the well dwellers are mostly migrant workers making a living collecting scraps or washing cars.

So what did police, part of that caring arm of the nation-state whose duty is to serve and protect, do to help after the public expressed shock and sympathy?

Instead of helping the well dwellers to find a better shelter while letting them earn money in the city, just one day after the Beijing Morning News report, officials from Chaoyang district dispatched workers to the area and sealed off all the wells with concrete.

Yup, they sure did. In a country that values the concept of “face,” this story comes as a surprise. As if living in a well wasn’t demeaning enough, these people are given absolutely no face by being kicked out of their wells. Yeah. What do you think the cops’ parting words might have been, for maximum insult? “Go live with rats” is out, since, you know, these people were already living inside wells. “Go live somewhere less filthy, you degenerates”?

Beijing officials hate marginalized people living in wells, seal them off with concrete (Hug China)

It begins:

Ravaged by hunger and desperate for food, these are the sad pictures which show just how needy families in China are.

Oh yes, look at these people ravaged by hunger…

…desperate for food…

…and… smiling?

…and waiting IN AN ORDERLY FUCKING QUEUE.

First: can we agree that these people aren’t ravaged and desperate?

But second, and more importantly: we all know there is poverty in this world. How we compartmentalize that fact so that we can continue functioning without the anvil’s weight of guilt turning us into unproductive saps is up to us. We compartmentalize ugly realities every day, in fact, for otherwise we’d be too shocked at the world to ever properly function in it. The Daily Mail’s response, however, is to direct the end of a scraggly and wrinkled fingertip down upon the faces of the impoverished and say, “Poor people. POOOOOOOR PEOPLE.” They express sadness and pity at their existence, yet are immediately and immensely comforted when you change the subject to, say, the benefits of organic living, or hand over a hazelnut latte. The Daily Mail is like Miranda of The Tempest – “O wonder goodly goobies, O brave new world, how beauteous mankind!” — if Miranda were deposited not on an island but Taiyuan, Shanxi province: “O THE POVERTY, MY WEEPING HEART.“ The Daily Mail is the worst type of privileged first-world colonialist asshole.

In the interest of fairness, here’s the article’s second and third paragraphs:

Parents and children queued for hours, just so they could snatch a few free cabbages which were being given away.

Shopping mall bosses in northern China gave away 200 tons of greens to their desperate customers.

POOOOOOOOOOR PEOPLE.

For a fun time, read to the end and learn about how oat is integral to Inner Mongolia and Tibet.

(H/T Alicia)

Sina Weibo user @公民李元龙 may have posted the first photo of those five Bijie children who died of carbon monoxide poisoning in a trash bin last week, and it’s perfect. Look at that light. In a post that was published yesterday at 9:18 pm (884 forwards, 322 comments so far), @公民李元龙 writes:

A miracle, I obtained a picture of those five children who died of suffocation. Apparently it was the day before the children died, using a phone at Bijie College, taken on the stone steps of a highway underpass just 200-some meters from the place where the children died.

News of the children’s deaths continue to circulate, with Xinhua writing an editorial yesterday calling the incident “a wound in society.” Many netizens have compared the story to Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Little Match Girl,” about a poor Danish girl who sells matches on the street. The Bijie boys — so-called because they lived in the poverty-stricken coal-town of Bijie, Guizhou province — died of carbon monoxide poisoning from the matches they lit while trying to stay warm inside their dumpster. Notes Wall Street Journal:

“When I was little, the study topic for ‘The Little Match Girl’ was: Understand the horrible tragedy of the little match-selling girl’s death on the streets on New Year’s Eve and how it reveals the darkness of capitalist society,” wrote one Sina Weibo user. “Vicious capitalist society! That’s how we were educated.”

Wrote another microblogger: “I thought the little match girl was something that only happened in capitalist societies. Why this sense of superiority about our system?”

And of course, people are wondering how bureaucrats can strut their wealth when so many people have so little. Via Tea Leaf Nation:

One commentator (@木尔) with more than 40 thousands followers contrasted the death of these boys with the wealthy life led by the Party Secretary from the same city, who the blogger complained has a weakness for luxurious leather belts: “[The cost of] any one of his belts could easily cover many people’s foods and clothing.”

Indeed, the search for a culprit ranged far and wide: Sloppy governance, careless parents and schools, an indifferent community.

…As fairy tale writer Zheng Yuanjie concluded: “Though you left the world in a dumpster, you are not trash. The irresponsible adults are. A child frozen to death means a future frozen to death. Beijing spent 800 million RMB to [heat the city for an additional 15 days this winter], but still did not warm you … please forgive us.”

But poverty simply has a way of being, in any society. It’s always a tragedy; what can any of us do? Perhaps let the story be a reminder for all of us to be a little better.

(H/T Josh Chin)