 important about doing this conversation with teams today is that tomorrow morning, we are delivering almost 4,000 signatures to PBS. And PBS is censoring a film where someone else went to China to try to understand how did China alleviate poverty? And so tomorrow, activists from Code Pink, world beyond war, environmentalists against the war, veterans for peace, Hawaii peace and justice, mass peace action, along with signatures added to that list are Emmy and Peabody Award-winning director, Eugene Durekki and Oscar-nominated Petra Costa and Robert Carl Cohen, who's the first American to direct a documentary on China in 1957. So they'll take all these signatures and deliver them to PBS headquarters in Arlington, Virginia to tell PBS to reinstate Robert Kuhn's documentary, Voices from the Frontline, China's War on Poverty. So PBS has closed down how that happened. And so now we have Ting's, who's actually gone out and asked questions. So, Ting's, I wanna start out with, it's a country of almost a billion and a half people. And first maybe tell us how many people have been taken out of poverty in China because I remember when I was a kid and even coming into adulthood in the 70s, China was one of the poorest countries in the world. I mean, we used to like, our parents would say, eat everything on your plate, there's a starving child in China. So maybe you start out with that number because I wanna go to like, how big this question is. Sure, good morning, good evening. So glad to be here first of all, thanks to Code Pink and China's not an enemy. I just want to respond very quickly about the petition and why I think it's important. We actually spoke to Robert Lawrence Kuhn for the study as well. He's one of the China experts that's been following China's development for decades now. And it's interesting you said you got 4,000 signatures which is a good big feat. He told us that he's done probably about 4,000 broadcasts for PBS in those last decades. And he says the one production that they've had issue with where that got censored is one about poverty alleviation in China, which he was telling us it's the most neutral and beneficial story to the world. So it's a sign of our times. And it's a serious question. And definitely I think sign of the times that stories like this, where poverty is a human issue needs to reach the whole world is not getting told. So I'm very glad the campaign is happening but it's part of one of the reasons why studying and sharing about the poverty alleviation program is essential today because it's one of the struggles to even get the story out in the first place. But to go back and to answer your question, I mean, yeah, absolutely. I mean, we have to remember when the People's Republic of China was founded in 1949, it was considered the 11th poorest country when you talk about GDP per capita standards. And so, yeah, the numbers are big. I mean, the country is 1.4 billion and what China has announced is that the extreme poverty has been eliminated for the entire country, essentially for 1.4 billion people. But over the last four decades, it's actually been over 850 million people, especially through this rapid economic period, growth period. And what we focused on and what the main sort of news is the policy to eradicate poverty for the last 100 million, the most sort of difficult parts of poverty in the most remote areas of China. So that was what was happening in the last eight years. And in terms of numbers, it's huge. And so one of the things of going to the study or even going to the ground and talking with people is trying to understand what does that mean? Who are the people who participates in lifting people out of poverty, who lifted themselves out of poverty and what were the processes and programs and what did it look like? So there's numbers can be abstract, but the people aren't. So... So we're already talking about a lot of people having been lifted out of poverty before this. So we're talking about the hard work, the really, really hard work. And so how do you start a research project like this? How do you take this on? What are the questions or the lines of inquiry that led you through this? Yeah, I mean, it was definitely a big feat. We had to go into, you know, obviously the Chinese sources and the English sources to figure out how the story was getting told or not told, what were the gaps? So we looked at a lot of, you know, academic literature, but also looking at just media, what's been published. We also talked to some experts inside China, outside China. I mean, Robert Cune is one of them that we actually got to speak with. It was important for us to learn from those who've been studying this for way longer than we have. And then going to visit places, especially we got the opportunity to go to Guizhou Province, which is historically one of the poorer regions of the country, you know, ethnically environmentally diverse, but quite a poor mountainous zone. So we actually, that was probably the key aspect is going to the villages, going to the new communities that got built and just talking with people, that there's no other better way to learn than doing that. Well, maybe tell us some of the stories. I mean, that sounds really interesting to, I mean, that mountainous region is so mythological. I mean, it's so wildly beautiful. And I always wonder how do people live there? But tell us the stories that really affected you and maybe while you're doing that, what were the surprises for you? What did just, what shocked you? Okay, that's a good question. You need to think about where to begin. I mean, I think, I mean, one of the stories that were most interesting are mostly around, I think, women's stories. Of course, we know, you know, the situation for rural women in the world is always a measure of, you know, the state of a society, how a real poor woman lives. So we got to speak to quite a few women who participate in various aspects. So one woman that I got to speak with, her name is He Ying, and she herself is from a poor peasant background. She's in her 40s. And like many who come from a poor village, went and became a migrant worker in a wealthier province in Guangdong province in the South, actually the province where I'm from. And when she had her first kid, she actually left her kid in the care of her grandparents, of her parents, so the grandparents of the child. And working in the city, it's a long, long ways away in another province. And we'd go back every once a year to see the family. So that was really quite difficult because, you know, for basically the first 10 years of her kid's life, she only got to see him once. So when she was pregnant with her second child, she decided to enter the government's power alleviation program, specifically through what's called relocation, you know. Some people live in some of the more remote areas. It's actually not possible to break the cycle of poverty without actually moving to a more hospitable place where there are, you know, there's more proper infrastructure that the government can build infrastructure to, you know, we have to understand some people live in such remote places. You know, there's these things called cliff villages that it takes an hour and a half just to go to the nearest shop or, you know, to go to school, get the basic care might take, you know, three, four buses away plus two hour walk. That's the kind of remote conditions. Like China is a massive country, but many places still quite remote and mountainous like this region is. So she actually went and chose to enter the relocation program, even when some of her own family was initially, especially the elders were hesitant. I mean, some people have never left a village before. I think they've never been to a city. But what was really impressive is that in the process of her making this decision, she becomes a leader and, you know, she joins the party and becomes a leader and has basically now become a leader of 12 in a community of 18,000 people. She is part of the Women's Federation organizing programs there. She is basically there to take care of, you know, hundreds of households a day. Her kids are with her now. Her mother is there with her now. Her mother-in-law is there with her now. Her father is there with her now. And I think what was impressive is the kind of subjective process of transformation that this had as well as her material. Like you see the conditions she's living in now, but also how she became a confident woman. She's like, I was just a poor peasant woman. Didn't know much, you know? And in the process, she had to also challenge herself in some ways, challenge her own family. Challenge her own husband when, you know, her husband initially was saying, oh, you're becoming a leader. This is kind of threatening. I'm not used to this. But it's a process of actually convincing the whole community along the way. There's, this is, I think, I think contrary to a lot of the ideas that there's kind of a forced nature to it or that, you know, the government comes in, you have to move, you have to do this. It just doesn't work like that in the grant. People have to be brought into the process. They have to make the decisions to do so. They have to bring their families along. And that's the kind of anyone who's like an organizer will know that the essence of doing any kind of community-based organizing work is that you have to go in, stay with people, understand the concerns, and then build up leaders in the process. And I think that was probably one of the most touching stories. I'll just make a little anecdote for the kind of level of detail that some of these programs take place in. So as I mentioned, there's many elders that do move and it's the hardest people because they're seniors, they've, you know, haven't been to cities. It's hard to move it and not like for a young person who adapts pretty quickly when you get a nice new school and you get a lot of friends that you can just hang out with that are two minute walk from your house. It's a really qualitative shift of life, but for elders it's hard. So they organize these programs where young people in the community who have also moved become sort of adopted grandchildren and they have just volunteers to organize these six firsts. There's six programs to help elders who are, you know, need to learn to cross the street for the first time because they've never seen, you know, it's called the street lights. And there will be, you know, going to the supermarket for the first time because here in China most of the things are, you pay by electronic payment. So how do you learn to do that? How do you use an elevator for the first time? How do you, you know, and also go and see sites in a city? So these are kinds of the level of programs that have to take place as people get brought along to that in the process of lifting themselves out of poverty means that you also have to do the work to adjust to a new standard of life. And help each other, that's so beautiful. So that's not how Americans think about China because that sounds like direct democracy and community building and not the dictatorship. So let's back up and maybe you could educate us on the process, like, you know, what does it mean to take someone out of extreme poverty? How do you measure that? What are the measurements they're looking for? And then how do you do that? I think for this, maybe I'll share just a few slides because I feel like, you know, you started with talking about Robert Kuhn's film, we don't get many images of actually what life is like in China or at least the images in Western media are like, they always have some sort of gray filter and seems like everyone's really sad or like, you know, don't have like a human face to it. So I wanted to share just some things. Okay, I'll just give you one second. Are you seeing all right here? Okay, so I mean, how the program works in terms of the basics is this here. One income two assurances, three guarantees. So what does that mean? So one is like income level. So there is a basic income level that has to be met. In China, it uses a poverty line that's actually higher than the international standard set by World Bank, which is $1.90 per day. In China, it's $2.30. But I would say that's not as important as the other aspects, which is the two assurances and three guarantees. Two assurances is food and clothing. So that one of the things is, or it's a way to say no worries, that people don't have to worry about basic food and basic clothing. Okay, so you have clothing and you have food. The three guarantees is that housing, which comes with electricity and running water, that's one of the requirements. The second guarantee is that there's basic medical healthcare. And the third is education, which is free and compulsory in China for nine years. This is just one of the places we visited. And how it really works is people have to go to actually knock on the doors of people and actually find out who are the poor people, where do they live, and then what are the plans that need to be made for each and every family? And that part is pretty impressive because I mean, the country is huge. You can't just rely on statistics to generalize, okay, this is the percentage of poverty. It doesn't work like that, especially for the last pocket, as I mentioned, the most difficult pocket of the 100 million people living in extreme poverty. So they actually sent in the first year in 2014, 800,000 members of the party as going to knock on doors to just survey every household in hundreds of thousands of villages saying, okay, what is your housing situation? What is your income? What is your health like? What's education? And through that, it was this 100 million families or how intermittent people was identified. And then from there, the plans were made in the following years to figure out how people were lifted out of poverty. And I want to, this is actually a scene from the film from voices from the front line from Robert Kuhn, is that there's a huge amount of grassroots democracy and action that actually happens. It's not just about, you know, party officials or, you know, local leaders deciding, okay, this family is poor, this family is not, you actually have to consult and debate and have these open meetings that they call democratic appraisal meetings where people sit together with villagers and say, okay, my neighbor here, he's actually not poor because he's hiding three goats or, you know, this neighbor here is actually be lifted out of poverty or this neighbor here has, you know, lost a job and is in a difficult condition. So there's a whole process of that that happens and definitely something we don't get, you know, to see in Western media. And sometimes I see these images like this, I think, oh, I can get maybe why this seems threatening to US empire, you know, because it's real democracy and action on the ground that we never want to see or never once shown. And I guess maybe I'll just end this little part with this is that I got to move back to China during at the end of the COVID pandemic. So it is really the kind of the strength of this mobilization and organization in the communities that is, you know, why a campaign like poverty alleviation or why the combat against the pandemic has been quite strong. It's really the strength of sending people, you know, with that no organization is strong without his organizers. Like that's the basis, you know, and the people have to be there on the ground and be there in the communities, build trust and do the work. And ultimately that's one of the things I think gets lost quite often to people who are not in China is understanding that here, you know, the party and the government get huge support, you know, it's a wildly popular party and it almost feels like if you read Buster Meade, it's like there's gonna be like some sort of uproar, upheaval, it's gonna be overthrown any moment. It's so dictatorial, it's not. It's people actually in the communities on doing the work and that's what convinces people. Well, maybe you could explain to us what that looks like when you say people in the community doing that work, who are the people and what do they commit to and what does that work look like? Yeah, I mean, that's part was probably one of the more, when you asked me what's really impressive or shocking about learning is when going to the villages, you know, I had mentioned that there are 800,000 people sent to do the household surveys. But after that, there were actually three million party members like cadres that were sent to live for years at a time in the communities. And that's the real work of doing the planning with each family to figure out what's the way to exit poverty? Is it through creating new agricultural cooperatives where people can be hired in to work on the cooperatives? Is it through additional education and training like some sort of technical training to upskill people? Is it through small percentages to actually move to new homes? Is it renovating the homes that exist, making sure the water is good? It's this level for every family. But that takes people to do. And so these three million people on average is about one to three years that they live there living in the conditions as the villagers and peasants do. Actually, you know, over a thousand people actually died in the process because the conditions can be quite rough. It's not, I mean, like I mentioned some cliff communities, some communities that extremely remote, like far away from medical care and that kind of thing. And their job was to, you know, basically there's one person, one party member assigned to every family. And then these like party members plus local officials plus community members form resident teams, so teams that live in each village. And there's one team dedicated to each village. So we met one person, Mr. Liu. He was there for 83 years when we met him in this village called Danyang. And he was responsible for five families. So basically it's going around, visiting families all the time. They're from various ages. It's, you know, bone buzzing all the time. It could be like a Mr. Zhang saying, hey, you need to come over here. Immediately my front door lock is not working. I don't know how to resolve it. Or it's like Mrs. Wang saying, oh, my son's not going to school. Can you come here and talk to him and convince him? It's that kind of grain of detail of life that needs to be attended to. Because ultimately you can't gain trust. You can't, without, I mean, knowing the people and also helping them resolve their material realities in this daily basis. Remembering that these people are being sent to villages of where they, they might not even speak the local dialect. You know, they really want to avoid questions of, you know, maybe you have like local leaders that already have some sort of existing power. They want to avoid questions of corruption. So people are actually sent to where they don't have their kind of social base. They just sit there and go there and hit the ground running and do the work. And then you stay there until each family has been lifted out of poverty. Oh, wow. So you're, you're there making it happen. And so you're the success means you can leave earlier, or you're, you know, the not successes later. That's, that's profound. I mean, most of the time there's still, I mean, when we went with Mr. Liu, the program had officially ended. And I asked him, why haven't you all gone home? He had to, he has a daughter in her teens and she, you know, saw her rarely in those last three years. He's like, well, there's, you know, there's all this followup work to make sure people are not falling back into poverty. Like it's not just, okay, now you check the boxes and now it's done, okay, have a good riddance. But you actually have to stay to, you know, maintain the kind of transition as well, even though the program has been officially ended. So. Oh, so maybe you can talk more about that, that whole idea of that it's over. So what you're saying is that they were successful and then it's a constant effort because maybe you could talk, you know, how did they keep track? And even Matt Ho was asking, when did they send out that 800,000 person survey? When was that completed, the consensus? Okay, yeah. I mean, I think on the question of falling back into poverty is always a key one, you know? I think that the strength of the Chinese program compared to a lot of poverty alleviation programs around the world is that it wasn't just based on that first aspect, which is income. Like it wasn't a cash transfer program, which we see in many places. It could be a one-off or consistent, you know, transfer of cash. They was actually creating some conditions so that people can, whether it's, you know, yeah. In the countryside, lots of agriculture production, sometimes small-scale manufacturing, maybe even jobs related to, you know, ecological restoration, which was a big part, you know, like being forest rangers or tree planters, that kind of thing. So trying to create enough conditions that people can be employed or get the education sufficiently so that you can ensure that, you know, or ensure the best conditions that you don't fall back into poverty. That's definitely one of the aspects. If it was just a cash transfer program, once the money runs dry, then what do you do? But that is the thing, especially in the global Southworld, where a lot of the programs have fallen short to think about these multi-dimensional or kind of systemic factors around poverty and what causes poverty. But now, of course, the government is in a new phase to really think about, now, what is relative poverty? You know, eliminating extreme poverty is just, it's not the end goal, you know? It's just one step in the transition to see a society without poverty. Of course, that's the goal, right? So now there's kind of the focus is on that, the focus is on how to continue what's called revitalize the rural areas, how to ensure you can modernize our agriculture. How do you continue developing in a way that then can continue in this path? Because ultimately, you know, one of the things is, even though most Chinese people live in the city, now it's, I think, almost around 60%, it's not a peasant society as it was. You know, if you take it decades ago, there's still many people in the countryside and it's a country of 1.4 billion, but it only has 8% of the world's arable land. So the question of how to modernize the countryside have higher quality agricultural development, how to feed the people, you know, food security, huge. So this is part of the whole thinking. Poverty doesn't exist without thinking about how you continue on that path. Now, the question about how many people, when the 800,000 people were sent, it was in 2014 when they did that and that's how they collected the initial, I think it was about 89 million individuals to know that, okay, that list. But then they had to go back and verify and check and in the end it was just short of 100 million people. And they created a national database basically where this information goes into and of course, a lot of the questions in China is around the technological development. So they really deployed this and used this in a way so that different governmental departments can talk to each other. You have to talk between departments when you're thinking about healthcare, thinking about education, you think about employment. You can't get it just stuck in a kind of bureaucratic system but you need it to be able to dialogue. So that system helped with that. It's updated frequently because as I said, there's these millions of people on the ground visiting constantly. So if someone has found a job or lost a job or is sick with a certain disease, these things are able to be updated so that the best plans can be made and quite a sophisticated system really. So two questions that kind of go together. How do you see like the system socialism playing into this? Where, how is this a socialist experiment? But then also, how does 2,500 years of Chinese culture play into it? Where do those meet, support each other? Does that make sense? Absolutely, I mean, in a way, the struggle against poverty is as long as the history of China, it's 5,000 year old civilization that has experienced question of hunger and the question of how to make sure a land, a really big land mass and a huge population are living well. And it's not only just in the last 150 years of experience under colonialism, which kind of sunk the country into, as I said, when it was founded and PRC was founded, 11th poorest country. We have to remember 150 years before that, China was the biggest economy with a third, up to a third of the global GDP. So it went from one of the richest countries to the poorest and you can only understand that by understanding the history and the experience of colonialism that plunged the country into that. But including during the World War II period, I think in the West, there's a narrative that the World War II was won by the US, but what's forgotten is not only the 20 million Soviet soldiers and civilians that died, but also 30 million Chinese people who actually died in resisting Japanese fascism and imperialism in this country. So it just means that when the kind of socialist government was established, how difficult the conditions were from the historically inherited conditions, but that the principle thing from day one is around eliminating hunger, making sure that the wellbeing of people is primary. And one of the things we look in this study is how in each phase since 1949, what are the main drivers of uplifting the mass from poverty? But as I said, it's not a project that's completed even to today, even if there's a big announcement of ending extreme poverty. It's just a step in this very, very, very long history of ensuring the wellbeing of people. Not an easy thing, as I mentioned, till today, 1.4 billion people, 20% of the world population, 8% of the Arab land, that's a math that's almost impossible, but these are the big questions for humanity that the experiments, the social experiments here are trying to also address. So, Medea asks, do people feel shame being classified as poor, or is it actually adventations because you get government support? I mean, I think in a way, in the process of sort of also convincing that grassroots work, there are people that don't want to be classified as poor. There are people who, because of kind of association of being poor, there are people who wanna join the program and try to be as poor as they can to get subsidies or to grow, this is kind of just human, like these stories exist. But one thing I guess I wanna highlight, which also was quite impressed, maybe I will take advantage to share a couple more images is how much when visiting there is and also just in the course of learning about this program is how much there is like a centering of poor people and peasant life in the cultural aspect. So here, poor people as protagonists, it really feels like that. Here we, on the right, there were, and it's the cover that we use for the study is elderly women who were part of the relocation effort. And I just wanna emphasize here, the relocation was very much the last resort type of method. About 10% of the people who were lifted are probably relocated. So it's really the minority, but that's the reality. But so there were actually singing a song here. But even when you see things like, I don't know, TV shows, documentaries that are not banned here and movies, last years, one of the biggest blockbusters in China that was one of the biggest ever in Chinese cinema history is called My People, My Homeland. And it is about poverty alleviation. It's like a drama comedy focusing on different stories of poverty alleviation. So it becomes kind of the part of the popular imagination as well. But that is part of, I think, a cultural pride in saying, okay, this is ultimately a country that comes from peasants. There is a kind of visibleizing or attempting to visibleize rural life in even among urban society. And I wanna see, and maybe let's see what's here. Oh, this is her yin picking up her kid from school that I mentioned before, the woman leader who really nice woman, all the other kids are very jealous of him because they're very smart. There's this vendor that sells these like really nice corn snacks, which reminds me of childhood and it drives up by the school just when the bell rings. And so on that day his mom bought him a bunch. So he ran back to his kids like, okay, I have this huge bag that's like bigger than me of corn snacks, what do you guys have? It was a really nice moment. And maybe I'll just take this moment. You can't, there's no really audio for this, but I just wanted to show, I think you can see the video, right? So this is a really interesting, give a concrete example of how you bring in private sector and you bring in technology into poverty alleviation. So this is a project, a platform kind of like TikTok, but if TikTok was used for poverty alleviation. But so they basically create these, it's a video platform where they create studios in the villages to teach people, especially people who register poor in the program or in poor villages, how to use cell phones to take videos. And what you do is for every video, for every minute of video, you post up on the platform and that gets watched, you get credits for people watching it. And you also get credits for watching things and use those credits to basically exchange for goods on the platform. It can be like a rice cooker or get a walk, even farm tools. So it's very much trying to circulate goods in that way. And as a kind of a supplement to people's incomes as well. So here we have one of the kind of highest, like the most highest earners on the program, on the platform. And this little video she was showing me, she was like, oh, I, you know, she's from the Dong Ethnicity and she really likes to kind of showcase the local culture and her traditional culture. And this is like a drama, TV drama that she did after going through this training. And she got her brother and her sister-in-law and her neighbors and they went in and they wrote the script. They acted, they directed, they made the costumes. And when I just wanted to show her smile, even just to see how much pride there was in highlighting her daily life, what was the kind of types of stories, very much of daily life there. But also I was really impressed actually, the kind of, I mean, I could definitely never direct and produce a film like that. But I think it says something about what does, how these aspects of education, how these aspects of bringing out internet, electricity to the countryside and or bringing also private capital to the countryside, kind of integrating that all in a platform like this is I think epitomizes some of the really impressive things that are happening in the program. So, Tings, how much did this cost? I mean, that's a lot. And, you know, we spend all our money in the US on the military instead of lifting people out of poverty. What's the bill for this? And when you say a hundred million people just to give the audience a sense of how many cities, how many places are we talking about? No, that's a good question. I actually, I mean, you all know what the military budget is, but in, it was 1.6 trillion yuan, which is the equivalent about 250 billion US dollars that was spent, that was from public funds. But then there was almost like almost that equivalent amount that was also spent by the kind of enterprises, you know, that actually invested that total amount as well. Cause a lot of this, I mean, it's not just the party and the government alone. It's very much, you have to mobilize the whole society, all the sectors, you know, civil society, the private sector, public enterprises, you know, students, even the military, you know, how to come together and mobilize the entire society to do this work because the party alone can't do it. The government alone can't do it. And so that is another aspect that's quite interesting, but certainly the question of, you know, using public budgets to, you know, erratic extreme poverty versus per bombs on in other countries is a very topical one, I guess. And how many cities, counties, big places? So it was in a total of 128,000 villages and 832 counties and in total of this, it's like 98.99 million people. So it's massive. It's a really massive mobilization. Like it even feels like massive itself as an award that's big enough. And part of this was also building roads and putting an internet, is that correct? Yeah, I mean, but just even this video I showed you now, I mean, that's not possible without ensuring that you have internet, electricity and all the infrastructure to make it possible. So that's another kind of, you know, cost embedded in this. So in the process, they were over 1.1 million kilometers of roads built in the rural areas and access was brought to 98% of, internet access was brought to 90% of the poor areas as well, including like 25 million homes that were renovated, almost 10 million new homes that were created. So a big part of it is around the question of infrastructure, how to get to the areas in that they can also integrate better into the whole fabric of society. You know, if you're gonna make an agricultural project like a cooperative project succeed, you need to be able to figure out ways often through internet or online commerce platforms to bring that those products into the markets, bringing it into people who want to buy, for example, maybe some organic food that is being built that grown by peasants in these areas. So all of that is an infrastructural question as well. So, you know, this week we've seen this horrible report on the devastation the planet is gonna go through and that we're already in. And you haven't mentioned was carbon sequestration or dealing with climate chaos woven into this at all. Yeah. I mean, I think that's a really essential question over times. I mean, in China, I think there's a recognition, you know, that period of vast economic growth that kind of catch up with the industrialized West meant that like there was huge costs to the environment, you know, to the air, land, water. There is one of the really impressive things to see, you know, we can go more into some of the, you know, international climate commitments and China's role in that, but linked back to poverty alleviation, one of the key methods of their five key ones. And I mentioned, you know, like you have to productive projects like, you know, starting co-ops or agricultural production. And there's education, there's social assistance, there's relocating a mention, but one other key one is called ecological compensation. It's to how to generate work that's linked to ecological conservation and restoration projects. Knowing that, that is a big question. And so what's impressive is maybe I can just show, I know I've told Jodi this before, but I think it's quite interesting. It's around tree planting. So there's a report that came out by FAO, I think a couple of months ago, looking at new leaf green leaf areas globally. And in the last 30 years, 25% of the new forests were actually created here in China. I think it's something that it's impressive in a quarter of the world's new forests of the last 30 years. And some of this is linked to the question of poverty. How do you also, you know, people have to do the work of growing those forests and maintaining those forests and it's linked to the program. But also there are really creative ways to do that. So there's, I'll just show you on my phone. There's something else to try it. This is entering Chinese world. So this is Alipay, one of the biggest online payment. As I mentioned here, it's almost like a cashless society. I don't remember the last I brought around a wallet or have money, but there's one app in here called Ant Forest. And there's a little tree and there's a little carbon credits. It looks like a game and there's my cute little chicken and there's a whole monitoring thing. So basically this is incentivizing people to live a more low carbon lifestyle. So if I, for instance, decide to take one of the shared bikes, there's like millions of bikes here in the city or if I decide to walk instead of taking a car, I get a little, some grams of carbon reduced in my footprint. And then I can use that to feed my tree. So that's fun. It seems like a game you get incentivized, but this is actually, those trees aren't virtual. Those trees are actually get planted. So in just this app alone was responsible for planting over a hundred million trees, usually in desert areas or, you know, places where new forests are being built. And 400,000 jobs are created in the process of doing that. So these are some of the kind of interconnected ways of how to mobilize people who are in the city who wanna ride their bikes. How does that kind of link back into the work in the countryside? That's very far away from, you know, I'm living here in Shanghai, very far away from the reality here too. So definitely I would say the kind of innovations around how to challenge the questions of environments and restore, but also innovate to, you know, deal with our toughest questions over time is quite interesting and worth paying attention to. And maybe talk about, just cause we're on the subject, about recycling in China. Cause when I was there, I remember being the strictest recycling program I'd ever seen, like six different boxes and how do you? Yeah. I mean, I think obviously I live in a, you know, tier one city, one of the biggest cities in China. So how things work here often is that there's pilot programs and majors in some cities first, they test it and then they nationalize it. So here there's probably one of the more, I guess advanced programs, but I haven't lived enough cities to know. But on knowing that it is definitely very, I'll just explain how I do it. I live in an apartment building, an old apartment building and I have to go to the street corner. There's specific hours that it's open. There's always people working there. And there is, you have your compost, you have your different types of recycling. And then you have the last part is just residual things, but you, everyone goes down from the apartments and sits and like goes to these like these stations. And there's always someone helping you make sure you're sorting right as well. And what's really cute, is usually there's like a little hand wash station with some disinfectant right beside. So if you're on your way to work or something, you just covered in your own like compost or whatever stuff you had gotten rid of. But yeah, it's definitely quite diligent. And also you very rarely see too many like garbage cans on the street side too, because just ensure people don't just go into their trash anywhere they want or trying to, you have to go to the right places to actually throw your trash. And also how did this poverty alleviation program contribute to the success with COVID? Was it in any way, did it build the infrastructure that was able to be successful? What? Yeah, I mean, I think definitely one of the sort of surprising things is that, okay, the commitment of eradicating extreme poverty was there wasn't an anticipation of COVID. So by the end of 2019, there was still about 5.51 million people who hadn't been lifted out of poverty from the program. So there was a huge efforts to ensure that that target was still met despite COVID which I think is something quite impressive. I don't know enough to say how it added to probably was more of a challenge that was added, but I would go back to, I mean, here when I got here, just to see the community groups that are organized clearly in the party, every community has these neighborhood level committees and how much the work is done to make sure that, okay, at every entrance, there is temperature testing that people are going door-to-door to make sure people have food, water, is anyone sick? And so that kind of base organizations are the key to both programs is that there are the people there. Knowing each family, knowing each person's condition is the core, I would say, of how these programs succeeded, like poverty alleviation, but also how when a crisis happens that can be combated in an organized, massive way. So we're getting to the end of our hour and just checking with anyone in the audience if you wanna put some questions in the chat or from the team. Elizabeth, if you wanna put your question in the chat, that would be great. And also I see your questions, Kevin, I don't think they apply to the work that Ting's has done and certainly China spends much less on its military than the United States, not just per capita, but in dollars and cents. So instead it invests in its people, as we've seen in this project, that's a third of the military budget of the United States has gone to help the people. And the mission of Code Pink is to end war and redirect the money to the needs of people. And so we work every day on shrinking the military budget in the United States. And this work that we're doing, China is not our enemy, is about ending the U.S. aggression on China. Because, first of all, it's already had casualties in the United States because of the xenophobia and the attacks on Asian people because people in the United States can tell the difference between where you're from, if you're Asian. And it's affecting the pristine ecosystems of the islands around China. It's, the United States has already broken their commitment to China about not weaponizing Taiwan. We saw that this last week in a giant weapon sale to Taiwan. So we, as you know, in the United States are working to stop the United States government and their aggression on China to instant of increasing the military budget, take that money and serve the needs of the people. Most of the urban areas in the United States, everywhere I've been lately, there's homeless people and unhoused people in the streets of our cities. So another question from Medea, has China tried to coach other countries on how to alleviate poverty in their countries? If so, where and has it worked? Yeah, I mean, I think the question of how China's experience is useful or can be applied to the world is a good one. Of course, China has very particular characteristics in terms of how its government is running around its process of socialist construction and everything. It makes it a, it's not a model, I think, and neither, I don't think anyone here would ever want to say that this is a model that can be replicated. But I think there's many lessons in it. So there are, let's say, now, especially with the Belt and Road Initiative, various aspects of it that's linked to thinking about how the new infrastructures being built in these different countries, now there's almost 80 countries involved in the Belt and Road Initiative are going to be linked to some poverty alleviation programs locally. And there's at least some programs testing these kinds of models. But I think this is probably one of the next steps. But there's no real formal, formal poverty alleviation, you know, kind of an exporting of poverty alleviation so much as probably, okay, learning from the concrete experiences of, okay, how does making sure that access to, getting access to electricity, internet, to the rural countryside, actually assists in people being able to access markets day where they are so that they can generate jobs, that kind of question, but no particular programs that I know. Matthew Ho mentioned that the one, two, three slogan of assurances and guarantees would be an amazing platform for a candidate for president in the United States. So Elizabeth Shepard asked a question, there's a lot of responsibility for recycling and reduction of plastics. And it lies on the producers, is that different under socialism? And I don't know enough about that specifically. I just know that one of the things that now in addition to recycling has, especially in the major cities now in the last few months is basically banned all plastics use for any delivery and takeout. So now not only is there extra fees on it, but there's been development of biodegradable, one-time use plastics are now a huge, huge aspect. So that came in just in the last months of living here because of course also in the pandemic, people realize, okay, the amount of people that people are ordering takeout for the amount of plastics are surged all around the world. So this is actually just one of the ways that responding to trying to curb that consumption. But I don't know enough about plastics producers. I do know that the industries around bioplastics because of this have skyrocketed as you can imagine. And then can you talk about the female empowerment within the party cadres, if you have any information there? Yeah, I mean, the last, according to the last, the data coming from the last census, the party now is 95.1 million members, which is, if it was a country, the party would be the 16th largest or most populous country in the world was really massive. And one of the things consistently has been how to build up more women leaders. I mean, it is still in the minority, like there is about 25%, yeah, around 25, I don't remember if it's 25 million or 25% of the members are women, but it's around the same because it's almost 100 million people. And that has been, and that number is higher, which is interestingly among the younger members as there's been quite a surge of young people wanting to join the party. So I think that's gonna be a kind of generational shift of slowly empowering women. I would say, I don't have enough about what kinds of programs are being done, but I would say in just visiting some of these places, those are the stories that were most impressive to me is that how a person like Harying can go from being a very humble migrant worker, coming from a peasant background to becoming a key leader in a community of 18,000 people. So that says something about the process of developing leaders, especially women in the process. Madison asked that she's seen anecdotal evidence about especially Uyghur Muslim women leading village improvements. Are they cadre or just part of the community leadership that is just part of being in China? Yeah, I mean, this is an area that I actually don't know enough about. I only know more anecdotally from people who've actually gone to Xinjiang and actually seen the kind of community work and the role of women. So anecdotally, it seems like something that is happening but I actually haven't been there but it's a very good question. And I see the next question from Alan. I love that Ting's, you're so smart and you're offering so many answers that everybody wants you to answer questions that aren't in the context of poverty alleviation. So they see your brilliance and they want you to answer every question. So I'm not gonna answer Alan's question because it's way out there about a whole nother subject matter. I wanna thank everyone for joining us today for your questions. Ting's, thank you so much for going out in the field, for exploring and for helping us understand what poverty alleviation can mean. And yes, we're sharing the one, two, three. That's the simplicity. I mean, it's complex and simple and creating change, it's a complex problem and finding the ways to create simple lines through it that are important. Encourage everyone to go to the tri-continental and read Ting's full report and also check out codepink.org slash China. We have many resources for you and if you haven't yet acted on our PBS campaign it's at codepink.org off the homepage. This is a campaign we're just starting. We have directors joining every day that are with us and saying this is wrong. So to get this movie to be seen because like Ting says, it's one thing to be able to write the report she does and I super appreciate your photos and little videos but being able to actually see it in the film is also important now that you've got the context to take it deeper. So demanding from PBS that you wanna be able to see that film can help because I think it's important that we know, you know, when we put attention on something poverty could be alleviated and that it's a value that we certainly have a codepink that our whole mission is about moving the money from death and destruction and extraction and oppression to serving the needs of the people. So thank you so much Ting's for all you do. We look forward to having you back after your next research project and thanks all of you for caring about this issue. Thank you to RJ and Madison and the whole China's not our enemy team at codepink and we look forward to seeing you next time. Thank you, thank you codepink. Thank you, China's not our enemy and everyone who came RJ, Madison, wonderful. Thanks Jody. Thank you, ciao.