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Opinion
China’s anti-poverty playbook should inspire Hong Kong to act
- The single-mindedness with which Beijing has pursued its goal to eradicate absolute poverty is worthy of emulation
- The UN’s Sustainable Development Goals are good starting points for Hong Kong to work towards, mapping out local, measurable targets along the way
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China’s recent white paper celebrating the end of extreme poverty will be dismissed by critics as propaganda or PR fluff. Yet what cannot easily be dismissed is the evidence that mainland China has indeed made extraordinary economic progress over recent decades, and that its leaders have achieved much of what they set out to do in eradicating absolute poverty.
The speed with which draconian measures were introduced to curb the spread of Covid-19 is also telling. Those living elsewhere, including in Hong Kong, may be asking whether they are seeing the same degree of collective single-mindedness in pursuit of social goals in their own regions.
In January 2016, with a year remaining on his term as US president, Barack Obama announced a “moonshot” to find a cure for cancer, establishing a US$1 billion fund and task force to spearhead a five-year effort to accelerate immunotherapy breakthroughs. Five years on, there may have been some great progress – who knows? After the initial press conference and a report by then vice-president Joe Biden 10 months into the initiative, there have been no major public updates.
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