Misleading: World Bank leader did not say China currently has 770 million people in poverty
A screenshot featuring World Bank President Ajay Banga began circulating on X on March 25, claiming that he had said China has 770 million people in extreme poverty today.
The image features Banga speaking at the recently held China Development Forum 2024, and its Chinese subtitle reads, “China has 770 million people in extreme poverty” when translated to English.
Other accounts on X and Weibo also shared the same image. In total, they had more than 838 retweets and 3,693 likes as of this writing.
However, while Banga did say what was shown in the screenshot, Annie Lab found that the quote was taken out of context because, in this part of his speech, Banga was referring to the conditions in China in 1978.
What original video shows
A Douyin ID watermark was visible at the bottom of the viral screenshot, which led to a note on a Douyin user account with the identical image.
The note’s caption reads, “World Bank president: the road to development has not been easy, but China proves that anything is possible #AnythingIsPossible” in English.
This image seems to have been taken from a Douyin video posted by the China News Service (CNS) that reported Ajay Banga’s speech at the event.
We then looked for the original video of Banga’s speech and found a snippet of the video posted on China News Service’s YouTube channel.
During his speech, he mentioned poverty in China and its “development trajectory,” praising the “reforms that significantly reduced the poverty levels.”
The actual full sentence he said was, “In 1978, 770 million people in China lived on the razors edge of extreme poverty.”
We also found the full text of the speech on the World Bank’s website, which clearly shows that he was not talking about today’s China.
It appears that the timing of the Chinese subtitles of his speech in CNS’s vertical video on Douyin might have been one of the reasons it was taken out of context.
The video subtitles in Chinese show “in 1978” (00:00 – 00:02) and “China has 770 million people in extreme poverty” (00:03 – 00:08) separately.
We also checked the data from the World Bank, which shows that the percentage of the population living below the national poverty line reached near zero in China in 2021, a big drop from 17.2% in 2010.
In 2021 President Xi Jinping announced the “complete victory” in eliminating absolute poverty.
Ajay Banga met with Chinese Premier Li Qiang in Beijing on March 25. According to news reports, he thanked China for supporting the World Bank.
The Paper from China also debunked the same claim on March 28.
