COMMENTARY: A 1,000 euro life
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By Sami Sillanpää in Beijing
Luo Zhonghua was in such pain that she could not move from her bed for a year. The woman lay there in a chilly one-roomed hut with mud walls.
Luo's fate was noted in an article in Helsingin Sanomat in February of this year, as just one example of the problems facing people in China's rural areas.
Luo had no hope of getting to see a doctor. That would have required money, and her illness had already left her entire family seriously in debt.
I received a good deal of e-mail from readers in the wake of that article. As far as I know, at least two Finns sent Luo some money via the French non-governmental organisation Enfants du Ningxia.
The money found its way there. Thanks to the donations, Luo was moved in the spring to Yinchuan, the provincial capital of Ningxia, in north-western China, to a hospital where she could be examined by doctors.
As it happened, it was too late. The tumour growing near her spine was so advanced that an operation was out of the question.
Luo died in July.
Her operation would have cost EUR 2,500. Nevertheless, the price of saving her life would have been a great deal smaller than that. If Luo had had 100 yuan, the equivalent of roughly ten euros, she would have been able to see a doctor sooner. Perhaps the cancer would have been caught in time.
But the family lived from hand to mouth, so money like that was never put away for a rainy day. They only took a loan and got into debt when the situation was already far far gone.
Money can't buy you happiness. It's a saying that people who have money can afford to express.
The world looks rather different through the eyes of someone who is earning 20 cents an hour. When you work on those wages for ten hours a day of every day in the calendar, at the end of a year you will have amassed 730 euros.
This sort of money is the annual earned income of hundreds of millions of people in China, even today. For the great majority of the world's population, life and death is measured out in very small sums of money.
This year's Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to the Bangladeshi banker and economist Muhammad Yunus, a pioneer of microcredit. His Grameen Bank distributes small loans to people too poor to qualify for traditional bank loans. A rural woman in Bangla Desh may perhaps never be able to save 50 euros, but if she gets the same sum in a loan, her life can change, and radically.
The money could for instance be used to buy a sewing machine. This would enable her to do work, for which she could earn money. The money in turn can get her child into schooling. Education can lead to a profession. And from a profession the financial rewards can be such that the family never needs to go to bed hungry.
It was with small steps and small sums of money that the whole of China got moving just under 30 years ago, when the country began to reform its economy. When one person got a little money, others got opportunities, too. The development since then has been little short of incredible.
Since 1990, according to the World Bank, China has lifted 190 million people out of extreme poverty. In many other countries, the poverty level has only increased over the same time-span.
Again according to the World Bank, China's share of global poverty reduction in the period from 1990 to 2002 was a staggering 90 per cent. This is the real "China Syndrome", one of the world's great narratives of the past two decades.
China has developed to the point where it is bursting with hope. Yes, there are still the impoverished, but they see around them people who have risen from the slough of want. Those who have prospered see the opportunity to become genuinely rich.
China has not yet reached the stage where it can take care of its losers. China calls itself a socialist state, but when problems arise the state apparatus offers very little by way of support and security.
In that same February article, there was also a reference to a teenage boy named Luo Jinhu.
Luo's father fell ill. It was possible to get medical attention only with money, and there was no state help forthcoming. In order to pay for his father's treatment, Luo quit school and went to work on a construction site in the city of Hohhot, a thousand kilometres from home. At the time, he was 13 years old.
Luo was rescued by a donation from Finland. The money was used to pay off the EUR 2,000 in debt that had built up from his father's medical bills. Luo was able to return to school.
In six months, the boy, now 15 or 16, has clawed back one of the two years of schooling he missed.
Now Luo and his widowed mother have hope once more.
Two thousand euros, two lives. Life for some people carries the same price-tag as a new television set.
Helsingin Sanomat / First published in print 2.12.2006
The writer is Helsingin Sanomat's Asia correspondent.
SAMI SILLANPÄÄ / Helsingin Sanomat
sami.sillanpaa@hs.fi
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| 5.12.2006 - THIS WEEK |
 COMMENTARY: A 1,000 euro life
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