Saturday, January 21, 2012

Getting to Know Your International Contacts


For this blog, I chose the alternative assignment and I will focus on the country China. After reading the website of the Childhood Poverty Research and Policy Centre’s page http://www.childhoodpoverty.org,  my focus was brought to China. I always knew that China had a large population, and with that, there would also be a large population that live in poverty and have a poor quality of life. Reading this article gave me a since of hope that the people of China are not forgotten.  For instance, this article revealed that China has made major strides in poverty reduction.  According to CHIP, 5 per cent of China's population lived below the national poverty line in 2001 and based on official statistics, rural poverty is believed to have fallen from 250 million in 1978 to 35 million in 2000 and from 30.7 per cent of the population to 3.7 per cent.

In addition, I learned that 4.2 million Chinese children live in absolute poverty and 8.7 million live in disadvantaged conditions.  And according to CHIP, education and health levels in China are higher than in many countries with equivalent incomes life expectancy at birth is 71 years, and 85 per cent of the population aged over 15 are literate. Although this information was promising, I still find it to be troublesome that so many people are in such poor conditions especially when we live in a time were technology has improved, I would think that would provide the people of China with more opportunities to be self sufficient.


Furthermore, a study was conducted in Beijing, China's richest city, found that a large percentage of this city’s population cannot afford the education costs for their children i.e., tuition fees and stationery costs, while more than half of poor families in Shanghai had no medical insurance because they could not afford it; hence generational poverty will continue unless some sort of change/reform is made.


Reference:
http://www.childhoodpoverty.org/ Retrieved January 21, 2012.

Nicky



3 comments:

  1. WOW Nicky, great information. I had always thought of China's one child policy in a very negative way. Do you think that the amount of children living in poverty is one of the reasons the government wants to limit the population growth in China?

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  2. Nicky,
    Although the educational system in the United States is in need of improvement I think of all the children here that would receive no education if it were not provided for free. Free being relative as it is funded through tax dollars in most states, but certainly less costly than having to pay tuition for most families. Thank you for the information.

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  3. Nicky,
    You know I did the same blog for this week, and I was amazed also at the number of children that lived in poverty. This is country is appears to be rich. With all the things that are exported, do you think they have funds somewhere to support the children.

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