Give offline villages a chance to click away poverty
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Imagine if one day you permanently lost access to the Internet. What effect would it have on your life?
If you are old enough, you can probably remember a time in the not-so-distant past when no Internet would be normal, being unplugged today is a distressing prospect.
When you're not connected, you suddenly become less competitive in today's world. I realized this when I visited a poor village in Shaanxi last winter.
One villager was sitting idly at home since the harvest season was over and there was nothing to do. He was one of the more cosmopolitan villagers in the area. He had actually left the village once during his 74 years to visit Xi'an (the provincial capital) - in 1977. He said he'd heard that the city has changed since then, but he was under the impression that Deng Xiaoping was still the leader of China.
Villagers like him in western China stand in stark contrast to fellow countrymen on the eastern coast who typically personify China's economic miracle. On average, people in the eastern part earn more than three times the income of those in the interior.
The Chinese government has been trying to address this disparity for the past decade with their western development campaign. The campaign aims to improve living standards in China's western regions by developing infrastructure, attracting foreign investment, increasing environmental protection, and promoting education.
It's been a decade since these initiatives were launched, and they are making inroads, but very slowly and for a very limited proportion of the rural population. The pace more or less matches that of the US westward expansion. But that expansion happened over the 19th and early 20th centuries. Surely China can do better in the 21st century.
Now, instead imagining what your life would be like without the Internet, imagine how that Shaanxi villager's life would change if he was suddenly connected to the information superhighway.
A better take on current events would only be the beginning.
