In 2015 China set the goal of eradicating poverty by 2020. So, has it happened? On August 27th, SupChina is hosting a Sinica live podcast with Chinese poverty policy expert Gao Qin and Matt Chitwood, an American that recently returned from two years in a remote mountain village in Yunnan province where he observed first-hand drastic social and economic change in rural China, to discuss the reality of China’s poverty eradication in 2020.

This event will be hosted [On Zoom] Thursday, August 27th, 12:00pm EDT. This time may be different based on your location. Here are the times of the event for several time zones:
Thursday, August 27th
San Francisco 9:00am – 10:00am PDT (UTC-7)
New York 12:00pm – 1:00pm EDT (UTC-4)
London 5:00pm – 6:00pm BST (UTC+0)
Paris 6:00pm – 7:00pm CEST (UTC+1)
Friday, August 28th
Beijing 12:00am – 1:00am CST (UTC+8)
Sydney 2:00am – 3:00am AEST (UTC+11)

About The Speakers:

Matthew Chitwood 
Matthew Chitwood recently returned from two years in a remote mountain village in Yunnan province where he observed first-hand drastic social and economic change in rural China. Prior to his fellowship with the Institute of Current World Affairs, he developed, managed, and taught for study-abroad programs including CET, CIEE, and Where There Be Dragons. He also worked for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the U.S. State Department’s Critical Language Scholarship Program.

Mr. Chitwood holds a dual M.A. in China studies and international economics from Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), and completed the graduate certificate program at the Hopkins-Nanjing Center. He has written for The New Republic, Foreign Policy, and The American Interest magazines and is currently working on a book based on his fellowship research.

Qin Gao
A Professor at the Columbia University School of Social Work and the Founding Director of the Columbia China Center for Social Policy. Dr. Gao studies poverty, inequality, social policy, migration, and child development in China and their international comparisons. She is also a faculty member of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute of Columbia University and a Public Intellectual Fellow of the National Committee on United States-China Relations.

Qin Gao’s book, Welfare, Work, and Poverty: Social Assistance in China (Oxford University Press, 2017) presents a systematic and comprehensive evaluation of the world’s largest social welfare program, Dibao. She discussed the book in a SupChina’s Sinica Podcast. Dr. Gao’s current research focuses on China’s efforts to eradicate rural poverty by 2020.