Why I am Interested in Poverty in China

I hope that the IPASA Blog can be a meaningful forum for both learning about poverty, and for thinking about the poverty problem as it relates to our individual selves. Therefore, I thought it might be worthwhile to write a post describing my background and explaining why I am interested enough in the topic of poverty in China to be spending my year at PKU studying it, and working on founding the International Poverty Alleviation Students Association. Please feel free to comment or write your own post (in English or Chinese, of course)!

On a basic level, poverty and China are of course both worthwhile general academic topics. To the extent that life is meaningful, then people’s obstruction from pursuing meaning by a lack of access to resources is certainly an important problem. China is the world’s largest country with a rich history and culture, and more positive change might be happening in China than anywhere else. However, I think a good question might be why I, myself, would be so interested in the intersection of these topics, since I truly have very little background in either of them. Although my great-grandparents were empty-handed Jewish immigrants to the U.S., I personally have enjoyed an upbringing and education that almost anyone would describe as being the opposite of poor. My home country’s global position relative to China is such that American parents tell their little children that if they dig a whole straight down in the ground for long enough, they will eventually emerge here.

Despite my distance from both poverty and China, I think that China’s poverty problem is both a meaningful issue for someone with my interests, and a logical target for someone with my background. China and poverty are each meaningful to me for their own reasons. To start with, I can trace my interest in China back to a very young age. Many people probably have a very lofty basis for their intellectual interests, but I am unashamed to admit that mine began with Chinese food. I was brought up in Philadelphia, a city about mid-way between New York and Washington, DC. My parents often used to take my older sister and me to restaurants in Philadelphia’s Chinatown. I found the food to be both delicious and strange, stared at the simple “picture” words before the English name of each dish and thought they were both elegant- and weird-looking, and heard the servers and owners talking to each other in a language which to me at the same time sounded sophisticated and kind of funny.

Since the U.S. is a “melting pot” country of immigrants, two lessons that are continuously emphasized in its educational system are that people’s cultural differences are a treasure, and that, with regard to important matters, people actually mostly have the same interests. So, when I was lucky that my high school offered a chance to actually study the very language of the Chinese restaurants (at least, the Mandarin-speaking ones), it seemed to me that I had a chance both to embark on a journey collecting valuable knowledge, and also to undertake a meaningful task of building a bridge to help link two groups of people who ultimately had much in common with each other. After devoting much attention over a period of many years, I have come to believe that China, while indeed as great as I originally thought, is not more strange and funny than my home—and that Chinese people are indeed in most basic ways very similar to me. Furthermore, when I come to China, I can try to help Chinese people to learn that the U.S. has a positive culture, and that I am ultimately no stranger than they!

In addition to studying China, I also think that it is quite appropriate for me to be studying poverty. In college, in addition to studying International Studies and Chinese, I also majored in business. In fact, also since I was young, I have been very interested in business and money. This interest has not really been a product of much of my educational development: even in the capitalist U.S., students are commonly taught from elementary school through high school (and certain majors in college) that the most important lesson about money is to understand its limits. Although America’s education system contains a diversity of viewpoints with regard to many issues, all teachers seem to endorse the phrase that “Money cannot buy happiness.”

Even in elementary school, I remember finding this lesson dissatisfying. Aside from the question of whether, for example, a new toy would make me happy (perhaps, perhaps not), I did know that so many things that enabled my existence required money. Money allowed my parents to buy me my favorite books, which I knew could make me happy, and which happiness seemed to always be approved by my teachers. In another way, when I ate breakfast and dinner my parents used to always command me to finish all of the food on my plate, and to remember how lucky I was to be unlike the poor, starving children of the remote regions of developing countries who did not have anything to eat. If those children had a little bit of money, than certainly they could use it to buy a happier life. A lot of extra money did not seem to be that useful, but it seems that there are many ways in which money can buy happiness.

Studying as a business major in college, I have learned to appreciate money and business as being some of the world’s greatest problem-solving tools. Economics don’t solve every problem, but if they are set up right, then they seemingly can enable a society to accomplish almost anything. Studying economic development amounts to studying business’s most important—and therefore, I would say, most interesting—problem: how to create more opportunities for more people to gain money. Muhammad Yunus, the original creator of formal microfinance, has described poor people as being “bonsai people,” like perfectly good trees whose environment has restricted them from growing to large size (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonsai). People’s intellectual curiosity is satisfied by solving problems, and as Confucius said, 仁者无忧. So, even though I am lucky not to have a “background in poverty,” I think it makes sense for me to engage the topic.

Of course, China has provided me with a special opportunity to study (and perhaps, some day, work in) poverty alleviation. For one thing, China has a huge poverty problem which remains to be solved. Also, though, China’s economic development has been historically unprecedented. By studying how business and money have grown in China, one can learn more not only about Chinese society, but also about how economics can work. To that end, I hope that IPASA can be a helpful group for all of us members. While being a community that incorporates international knowledge exchange and cooperation, we can help each other learn about the most interesting and important economic topic, poverty.

by Jon