This is apropos a Business Recorder news item “Poverty alleviation: PM reiterates his fondness for the ‘Chinese model’” carried by the newspaper yesterday. It is a fact that prime minister Imran Khan has been regularly expressing his admiration for the strategy through which China, the world’s largest country in terms of population, has successfully lifted hundreds of millions of Chinese people out of abject poverty in a matter of a few decades.

But he, in my view, ignores, for example, the fact that China owes this historic success to a variety of factors, including one-party rule and universal health and education that Chairman Mao had bequeathed to his successors starting from Deng Xiaoping in the late 1970s.

The Communist Party of China is the principal reason behind China’s success or prosperity. It is under this party’s ongoing rule that the Chinese leaders since Deng—Jiang Zemin, Hu Jintao and Xi Jinping—have conceived, planned and executed all poverty alleviation plans. It is important to note that although the Chinese were mired in poverty when China embarked on the path of economic prosperity, they still enjoyed universal health and education.

Moonis Masood (Karachi)

Copyright Business Recorder, 2022