Beijing, China.- A heartbreaking video of a retiree showing what she can buy with 100 yuan (about $14.50), her monthly pension and only source of income, has gone viral on the Internet in China. But then the recording was deleted.
One singer expressed widespread frustration among Chinese youth over their dire finances and bleak job prospects with temporary jobs.
“I wash my face every day, but my pocket is cleaner than my face,” she sings. “I went to university to help rejuvenate China, not to deliver meals.” Her song was banned and her social media accounts were suspended.
A migrant worker who worked hard to support his family gained widespread sympathy and attention last year after he tested positive for Covid-19.
He became known as the hardest working person in China. Censors blocked conversations about him and local authorities took up positions in front of his house to prevent journalists from visiting his wife.
China says it is a socialist country that aims to promote common prosperity.
In 2021, its top leader, Xi Jinping, declared “a comprehensive victory in the battle against poverty.” However, many people remain poor or live just above the poverty line.
With the country’s economic prospects darkening and people’s growing anxiety about their future, poverty has become a taboo subject that may draw the ire of the government.
In March, the Cyberspace Administration of China, the country’s Internet regulator, announced that it would crack down on anyone who posts videos or disseminates content that “deliberately manipulates sadness, incites polarization, creates information that damages the party’s image.” and the Government, and disrupts economic and social development”.
The measure prohibits sad videos of the elderly, people with disabilities and childhoods.
Hu Chenfeng filmed the footage that was removed from the Internet in China.
On popular video sites, he had posted a recording showing an elderly woman living on just $15 a month.
In the words of many social media users, he was revealing too much. “This topic is untouchable,” wrote one user in a now-deleted discussion thread on Zhihu, a Quora-like site.
Another wrote: “Your account was censored simply because it showed what life is like for many people.”
In the video, which can be found on YouTube, Hu interviews the woman, a 78-year-old widow, on the street in the southwestern city of Chengdu.
She said that she planned to buy only rice, about the only thing she could afford.
I haven’t eaten meat for a long time. Tears rolled down her cheeks as she recounted his financial difficulties. The two walk through a grocery store. They bought rice, eggs, pork and flour. The bill came to 127 yuan. Hu insisted on paying.
He was also emotional, ending the broadcast very sadly.
The video has been removed from the two largest video platforms in China. Hu’s accounts were suspended.
Income inequality is a problem in many countries, including the United States.
In China, the largest division of wealth is between rural and urban residents.
The gap is created by government regulations that tie social benefits, including education, health care and pensions, to a person’s place of birth, not according to their residence, income or needs. The policy particularly hurts retirees.
In 2021, older people in the countryside received an average of $27 a month in social security benefits, according to a government report.
That pension is about 5 percent of what the average urban retiree receives.
A viral video about elderly people struggling to make ends meet took place in Henan, one of China’s most populous provinces, where the government increased monthly pensions for rural residents from $16 to $18 this year.
The video shows two porters in their 70s unloading a cement truck with their hands and shoulders.
In China’s years of miraculous economic growth, from the 1990s to the mid-2010s, poverty was not an issue people paid much attention to.
Now, with the country’s economic engine about to explode, middle-class Chinese fear they could slip back into poverty, part of the reason these videos attracted attention.
Due to propaganda and censorship, many of them were unaware of the depth and prevalence of poverty in the country.
When the Prime Minister at the time, Li Keqiang, said in 2020 that 600 million Chinese, 40 percent of the population, had a monthly income of less than $150, some people, who did not know where the numbers came from, they called fake news.
The official People’s Daily had to call the State Bureau of Statistics to confirm that it was true. The official Chinese press rarely mentioned the dubious number again.
Another reason why poverty is considered a novelty among the middle class is that local governments often persecute beggars and the homeless.
They become invisible in big cities.
The Beijing government not only prohibits beggars and the homeless from staying in the city. In the winter of 2017, he kicked out many low-income people from his apartments to get rid of what he called “low-quality population.”
Now, with video influencers scouring the country, trying to find eye-opening revealing facts online, the public can see the poor and some of the unsavory aspects of life in China. That is one of the reasons for censorship.
In addition to poverty, the Government does not want the public to dwell on another major social problem: youth unemployment, which according to the Government has reached almost 20 percent.
One composer used a well-known literary figure, Kong Yiji, an educated but poor intellectual who lived during the Qing dynasty, to counter the government line that young people can’t find jobs because they don’t try hard enough.
The song was censored and the singer’s online accounts were suspended.
The official media, in turn, published articles about university graduates who made a decent living by collecting garbage or becoming street vendors.
The government wants to “deny the prevalence of economic recession and unemployment” and avoid accountability, one user wrote.
The same can be said of poverty. By censoring online videos and discussions, the government is evading its responsibility to provide the most basic social safety net for the poor.
“I recorded these videos in the hope of earning some money while pushing our society forward a bit,” Hu, the influencer, said in a video posted to a social media endorsement account that had not been blocked. “But I never expected this to be prohibited.”
