Distributing Fish or Fishing Hooks? Examples of the Targeted Poverty Alleviation Program in Tibetan Pastoral Areas of Qinghai

Result code in IS VaVaI

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Result on the web

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DOI - Digital Object Identifier

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Result language

angličtina

Original language name

Distributing Fish or Fishing Hooks? Examples of the Targeted Poverty Alleviation Program in Tibetan Pastoral Areas of Qinghai

Original language description

By 2020 there will be no more poor people in China. This is the aim of the ambitious plan of the recently launched program of Targeted Poverty Alleviation Jingzhun fupin (精准扶贫). Previous government programs to modernize the countryside adopted a one-way top-down implementation procedure and overwhelmed the rural population with diverse material and financial subsidies and support. With the extended duration of state assistance to rural populations the subsidy investments from the state are reaching unbearable amounts, while many households are still unable to establish alternative sustainable livelihoods. To address this issue, Chinese development and poverty alleviation policy aims to change the major distribution strategies. In this regard, the current approach of China’s policy of Targeted Poverty Alleviation heralds a paradigm shift from distribution of direct subsidies as the main development approach to distribution of knowledge and technology. In the Tibetan pastoral areas of Qinghai, however, the decades of predominantly direct subsidy distribution have influenced people’s attitudes towards paid labor and the socioeconomic values of the rural population, who have been spoiled by the generous support of the government during the last decades, seem to have changed significantly. In many rural households, the key question is thus not “how to establish a sustainable livelihood,” but instead “how to be eligible for additional state subsidies” to live on. Changing people’s attitudes and getting the rural population actively involved in rural development again might now be among the biggest challenges the Chinese state has to face. At the same time, although the theoretical policy approach has changed, the speed-driven and quantity-oriented evaluation of policy results does not leave the implementing officials much space to apply innovative methods of development policy and poverty alleviation. This paper presents the launch of the Targeted Poverty Alleviation program in the context of China’s strategies to restructure the countryside. Examples, such as the case of Tsé khok (rTse khog, Zeku 泽库) County, however, suggest that Targeted Poverty Alleviation seems to follow the same implementation strategies as previous development policies that have targeted socioeconomic improvement on the household level in rural Qinghai since the start of the Great Opening of the West Development Strategy.nnn

Czech name

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Czech description

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Type

C - Chapter in a specialist book

CEP classification

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OECD FORD branch

50401 - Sociology

Project

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Continuities

I - Institucionalni podpora na dlouhodoby koncepcni rozvoj vyzkumne organizace

Publication year

2019

Confidentiality

S - Úplné a pravdivé údaje o projektu nepodléhají ochraně podle zvláštních právních předpisů

Book/collection name

Mapping Amdo: Dynamics of Power

ISBN

978-80-85425-68-0

Number of pages of the result

23

Pages from-to

187-209

Number of pages of the book

271

Publisher name

Oriental Institute

Place of publication

Prague

UT code for WoS chapter

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