We are pleased to republish below an article by Taylor Dorrell on China’s use of big data and other digital technologies to tackle poverty and improve livelihoods.
Describing the unprecedented successes of China’s Targeted Poverty Alleviation (TPA) program, Taylor notes that the immense human effort associated with the program (involving the deployment of several million cadres to work in impoverished areas and collect raw data on household poverty) has been greatly facilitated by the use of digital technologies. For example, at the Information Center of the State Council Office of Poverty Alleviation, “billions of pieces of data are mobilised like ammunition to wage a decentralised war against poverty”. Meanwhile:
In the province of Guizhou, the government established the “Guizhou Poverty Alleviation Cloud” information system, which connected data from different government departments, sharing housing, education, and medical care data with industrial departments and data from poor households. Guizhou Renhe Zhiyuan Data Service Co., Ltd. collected data from over 20,000 villages to create a customized training program for workers based on skills and employment. It’s just a small example of how cybernetics has been used to address poverty.
Taylor joins the historical dots from the Soviet Union’s early experiments with cybernetics (to improve economic planning), through to the Allende government’s Cybersyn project in Chile, and on to China’s contemporary use of big data to eliminate poverty.
Using big data and modelling, China has been able to track and eradicate absolute poverty, a feat never taken on, not to mention achieved, by any country in history.
This article originally appeared on People’s World.
In China’s countryside, it is common to find elderly farmers moving from their ancient homes to new developments sprouting up across the land. Houses discovered to be in the path of disasters like floods and landslides, or houses that are simply too old, are being left for new condos closer to industrial or post-industrial jobs.
When Peng Lanhua’s 200-year-old home was designated unsafe to live in by the government, she turned down the opportunity to move to a new community an hour away, and instead, despite her age, or perhaps because of it (she’s approaching 90 and has seen China transformed from being a feudal state occupied by Japan to becoming an economic superpower), she chose to stay in the dilapidated structure.
Were Peng born in a crumbling shack in West Virginia, she might find herself with few prospects. Living with Alzheimer’s on a modest pension and low-income insurance, there would be little hope of fixing up her home, securing basic amenities, and improving her material conditions in her final years.
There is no government or party cadre visiting every trailer home in West Virginia villages to learn how the state and private markets can be mobilized to secure a minimum standard of living. There is no team following up to verify the conditions and see who has been raised out of poverty. However, Peng doesn’t live in Appalachia, but rather a remote village in Guizhou Province, a place that has been a part of China’s poverty alleviation program and was the subject of a recent study carried out by the international left-wing institute, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.
In 2013, China began the “targeted” phase of its long-running poverty alleviation program. Spending $246 billion to build almost 700,000 miles of rural roads, bringing internet to 98% of the country’s poor villages, renovating homes for more than 26 million people, and building new homes for almost 10 million people, China’s Targeted Poverty Alleviation (TPA) program is not tailored solely towards satisfying strict income requirements and quantitative improvements.
Following the slogan “one income, two assurances, and three guarantees,” the program addresses what’s called Multidimensional Poverty. “One income” refers to raising the daily income above the UN poverty line of $1.90; “two assurances” refers to food and clothing; and “three guarantees” is in reference to access to basic medical services, safe housing with clean drinking water and electricity, and free education.
In 2014, nearly three million cadres of the Communist Party of China were sent throughout the country as part of the program. There were 800,000 tasked with surveying every household, while another two million were tasked with verifying data, removing inaccurate case information, and adding new enrollees.
One cadre was assigned to live in every village to learn what families were going in and out of Multidimensional Poverty and why. Peng was one of the people helped by the program. Her home originally had a mud floor without a toilet or shower, but thanks to TPA, she now she has a concrete floor, an extension with a shower, toilet, and solar heated water, and is provided free internet and TV.
By 2021, the government announced that the almost 100 million people who had remained in extreme poverty in 2013—making up 832 counties and 128,000 villages—had now been raised out of absolute poverty.
Wang Sangui, dean of the National Poverty Alleviation Research Institute of Renmin University, says that tracking the alleviation of even one part of what’s called Multidimensional Poverty requires an extensive amount of data and mobilization from multiple sources. The first question to be answered is who among the country’s 1.4 billion people lives in absolute poverty. Attention then turns to how each of them is to be raised out of poverty. Finally, there is the task of tracking all of these efforts and accounting for their results.
Even just one performance indicator—access to safe drinking water—has multiple data points and factors that must be surveyed and tracked to ensure success in service provision.
“How do you classify drinking water as safe? First, the basic requirement is that there must be no shortages in water supply. Second, the source of water must not be too far, no more than twenty minutes round-trip for water retrieval. Last, the water quality must be safe, without any harmful substances. We require test reports that confirm the water quality is safe. Only then can we say that the standard is met,” Wang told TriContinental.
In Guizhou Province, Peng is just one individual living as one does at her age; her daughter and son-in-law live next door in a home built with government subsidies, and her children are all employed. Liu Yuanxue, the Party cadre for Peng’s village, checks in on Peng and other villagers once a month to see how they’re doing financially and personally. These Party cadre are physically there and connected to the happenings and conditions of the village to provide accurate data on the villages and coordinate assistance based on needs.
But at the Information Center of the State Council Office of Poverty Alleviation, Peng is a name, one of millions, in a network database spanning 30 million poor households in China. The billions of pieces of data associated with them are mobilized like ammunition to wage a decentralized war against poverty. In other words, cybernetics is being used to abolish poverty in China.
Cybernetics and socialism
Cybernetics is not as complicated as it sounds. It’s primarily a science, one that stresses communication and automated control systems. This takes place in both nature and manmade realms, whether it’s a colony of ants who rotate out inactive reserves of worker ants for deceased ones or a Walmart Supercenter adjusting toilet paper supply based on updated demand. Cybernetics is an attempt to rationally plan and adjust based on a network of data.
The first time cybernetics was consciously used in the technology-age in service of socialism was in the USSR with a program called the All-State Automated System, or OGAS by its Russian initials. The program attempted to establish a nationwide network of computers to generate a completely up-to-date overview of the Soviet Union’s economy to create a more robust system of resource allocation and production planning. The program, essentially an early attempt at creating an internet, was only implemented at local levels and unfortunately never received funding for a nationwide system.
The Soviet attempt at establishing a national cybernetic network is often overshadowed by Chile’s attempt and brief success under the three-year administration of Salvador Allende, in which the Cybersyn program connected 500 telex machines to one IBM computer. The system was tested when the CIA bribed the country’s truckers to go on strike in 1972. Cybersyn updated the central operations room on what factories were blocked off by striking truckers so that a modest number of supportive truckers could keep the country running, averting an economic disaster.
But a CIA-backed coup in 1973 led to the dismantlement of the program and the destruction of the operations room. Those involved with Cybersyn, like the British cybernetics pioneer Stafford Beer, were left without any socialist countries who wanted to use their cybernetic ideas. They were forced to turn to the private sector, to use cybernetics to increase private profits.
In The People’s Republic of Walmart, authors Leigh Phillips and Michal Rozworski argue that the private sector has developed the technology required to efficiently run a country’s economy in service of distributing goods more equally as opposed to maximizing profits. “If only Walmart’s operational efficiency, its logistical genius, its architecture of agile economic planning could be captured and transformed by those who aim toward a more egalitarian, liberatory society!” they say.
But the authors simultaneously oppose the principles of a planned economy and the reform period in China, opting instead for what they call “democratic planning,” a utopian ideal that might have more in common with China’s socialist cybernetics than the authors would like to admit.
Socialism with Chinese Characteristics
Cybernetics is a field that is split. It’s claimed by both capitalists and socialists—some accuse the USSR of trying to compete with the U.S. with their OGAS program while others accuse Western capitalist countries of stealing Allende’s socialist Cybersyn program. Cybernetics is claimed and used by all sides. But in China, cybernetics is used both to secure more efficient production for private profits and to benefit the masses who produce the profits.
Cybernetics with Chinese Characteristics shamelessly uses cybernetics. While it might be used to maximize private profits for some companies now, it is also laying the groundwork for the gradual construction of an efficient socialism. If deployed even more widely—as it has been already to alleviate the poverty of Peng Lanhua and millions of others—it could revolutionize global political economy.
How is it possible to prop up both private markets and socialist development? To understand Cybernetics with Chinese Characteristics, one first has to understand Socialism with Chinese Characteristics.
Australian Marxist academic Roland Boer argues that Western understandings of socialism are often limited to the simple definition of common ownership of the means of production. This emphasis on nationalization is rooted in Marx’s expectation that highly-industrialized capitalist nations would be the first to have socialist revolutions. He assumed there would be a mass industrial base to start with. But, as we now know, Communist-led working-class revolutions have not yet succeeded in industrialized Western European countries; instead, they’ve taken place in countries where the majority of the population were rural farmers or peasants.
“[P]roletarian revolutions have been successful overwhelmingly in places that had undeveloped productive forces,” says Boer, “so one finds that there is greater attention to liberating productive forces.” In other words, for there to be common ownership of the means of production, there needs to be a means of production to begin with.
And so, you find Communist-led governments like that in the USSR in the 1920s going through Lenin’s New Economic Policy, where private markets were encouraged in order to grow industry, or China under the leadership of Deng Xiaoping, who argued that “the fundamental [task] is to develop the productive forces so as to demonstrate the superiority of socialism over capitalism and provide the material basis for communism.” (It should be emphasized that while China has a private sector, state-owned enterprises (SOEs) dominate with 70% of China’s Fortune 500 companies being SOEs.)
It might sound antithetical for a Communist Party to grow capitalism in order to build socialism, but this is an essential step for some developing countries to build socialism. This was talked about by Engels even before the Communist Manifesto. He wrote in The Principles of Communism (1847), “In all probability, the proletarian revolution will transform existing society gradually and will be able to abolish private property only when the means of production are available in sufficient quantity.”
It’s therefore not surprising that big data and technology would be developed under private corporations and then be taken and used to help build socialism. Socialism was always a project that had to be built on top of capitalist means of production, an historical stage that follows capitalism. Cybernetics is just one tool used in a prolonged historical struggle to bring about the next stage of economic development.
Cybernetics with Chinese Characteristics
In the 2021 documentary China’s War on Poverty, filmmaker Robert Lawrence Kuhn gives a first-hand view of how poverty is being addressed. Kuhn visits the Information Center of the State Council Office of Poverty Alleviation, where all of the data is put on display through a map of poverty across the country.
“The information keeps changing,” says Lu Chunsheng, the director of the Information Center, “some are lifted out of poverty, while others are newly classified as impoverished.” He zooms in on Hainan Province, an island that is bright red on the map where, in 2015, there were 26,000 households living in poverty. By the end of 2016, that number was reduced to 25,000 and by 2020, China succeeded in eradicating absolute poverty from the island. (The documentary was pulled by PBS for “editorial” concerns, but Kuhn said it was because of “extraneous internal political matters in the United States.”)
China’s poverty alleviation program is a mixture of centralized data and decentralized implementation. In the 2021 study “Chinese Poverty Alleviation Studies: A Political Economy Perspective,” the think tank New China Research (NCR) claims that the program can be summarized by the “5Ds”: “Determined Leadership, Detailed Blueprint, Development-Oriented, Data-based Governance, and Decentralized Delivery.” Since 2015, China decentralized the approval authority for poverty alleviation funds so that local governments can allocate resources based on specific needs of the community. Local cadre who live within the villages directly ask local governments for funds to help the community or even for funds to help individual households. This methodology devolves authority and democratizes resource allocation while using big data to track, analyze, and verify the effectiveness of the efforts.
Prior to the 2013 campaign, poverty data was general and elusive. China’s statistical departments could track overall trends but had no way of targeting the poverty status of specific individuals. In 2014, the then State Council Leading Group Office of Poverty Alleviation and Development created the ambitious cadre mobilization program to register every individual in poverty. In 2015, two million people were tasked with verifying the data they collected.
Over nine million cases were labeled as inaccurately identified, and eight million new cases were added. All individuals identified as being in poverty had their data split into nine parts: “basic information, evaluation and identification, causes of poverty, assistance plans, income and expenditures, policies and guarantees received, inspection and acceptance for poverty elimination, relevant agreements, and consolidation and improvement.”
“Based on the family archives,” the NCR study says, “the country has for the first time established a unified national poverty alleviation information and management system that covers nearly 100 million people and is regularly updated.” Thanks to this data, China is able to identify the root causes of poverty. The government found that 42% of poverty cases were due to illness, 20% to disasters, and 10% to school-related expenses. The remainder fell into a variety of other categories.
In the province of Guizhou, the government established the “Guizhou Poverty Alleviation Cloud” information system, which connected data from different government departments, sharing housing, education, and medical care data with industrial departments and data from poor households. Guizhou Renhe Zhiyuan Data Service Co., Ltd. collected data from over 20,000 villages to create a customized training program for workers based on skills and employment. It’s just a small example of how cybernetics has been used to address poverty.
While China might not have a country-wide Cybersyn program to track the entire economy like Chile developed, they have nonetheless channeled cybernetics in their own unique way as part of the war on poverty. Using big data and modeling, China has been able to track and eradicate absolute poverty, a feat never taken on, not to mention achieved, by any country in history.
But if there’s one thing Cybernetics with Chinese Characteristics has taught us about socialist cybernetics, it’s that digital data can only do so much. The real work is carried out by the people on the ground—in this case, by those cadres who went door-to-door collecting data and living in the villages among the people. The magic is in the democratic decentralized implementation of the poverty alleviation program. “Bottom-up improvisation,” NCR says, “has been the driver of China’s escape from the poverty trap.”
