From hardship to superpower, China continues to astonish the world.
Since 1980, China has lifted 850 million people out of poverty, including since 2012, 100 million of the intractably poor. As a result, hundreds of millions of people have joined the ever-expanding working and middle classes, with access to housing, healthcare, education and jobs.
Xi Jinping’s poverty alleviation program targets people that even China’s growing economy couldn’t reach. His program tasked millions of officials to work at the grassroots level in remote villages with the intractably poor, to bring them out of absolute poverty and change China forever.
China states all extreme poverty was eliminated by the end of 2020. This unique, narrative documentary tells the story of how the ‘targeted poverty alleviation campaign’ actually worked, on the ground.
CHINA’S WAR ON POVERTY travels throughout China, following the agents of change and the families they assist.
No journalist or film crew has ever achieved this level of inside access across China, probing how poverty is defined, and how the alleviation program works on the ground — including asking what is done to find and stop fraud. During production, the film team pressed hard to let both government officials and poor families tell their own stories in their own words.
Today, over 400 million educated millennials are poised to change this growing superpower.
While China has broken all records of economic development in the past forty years, Xi Jinping views the poverty alleviation program as his most important task.
PHOTO GALLERY
Photographs by Peter Getzels