Give offline villages a chance to click away poverty
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He could learn better farming techniques so he could improve his yields in the summer and find ways to farm in the winter. Or he could learn a craft in the winter and find distant buyers for his goods rather than sitting idle.
His middle-aged kids could surf for better paying migrant work in other cities. His school age grandkids could vastly improve their education quality and enhance the chances of getting into a university. A little imagination can produce countless more possibilities in areas from medicine to the environment.
So could solving the income divide be as simple as solving the digital divide?
This is what Taiwanese millionaire Sayling Wen asked in 2000. As the Atlantic's James Fallows chronicled, a trial village in Gansu Province was equipped with broadband Internet and the results were exactly as those from my hypothetical Shaanxi villager scenario.
Amazed by the quick improvement in living standards, Wen pledged to repeat the success in a thousand other villages by hooking them up as well. Each village would cost only $50,000 for setup and training. But unfortunately for all those villagers, Sayling Wen suddenly died before the project could get off the ground. Since then, nobody with his clout has stepped up to continue his work.
While the Chinese government's push to build infrastructure in the west development campaign is admirable and necessary, it represents more of a "give a man a fish" approach.
They should couple that with a "teach a man to fish" strategy and divert as much money as it takes to make sure every village in China has access to the Internet's wealth of information. By doing this, they'll find that many of the problems they hope to address will solve themselves much faster and at a much lower cost.
Currently China tops the world in the raw number of Internet users, but this stems from sheer size. Only 32 percent of China's population is online. Most developed countries have Internet penetration at somewhere around 80 percent.
So far, these higher rates of Internet connectivity have come as a result of economic development. China should be the first to show the world that the tables can turn. Villages can open up to the world by ensuring online access for everyone.
The author is a master’s candidate of Global Business Journalism at Tsinghua University. ericfish85@ gmail.com
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