China Says It Has Ended Poverty. Is That True?

The Qixingguan community is designed to look like a socialist paradise. Identical rows of dozens of yellow apartment buildings, emblazoned with slogans expressing gratitude toward China's Communist Party, provide free living quarters for people once isolated in remote, mountainous villages. Near the complex, small garment factories were supposed to create jobs, and one of China's biggest real estate companies built two elementary schools.

But many of the complex's some 32,000 residents say they are still waiting for the life they were promised when the community launched in 2018.

"We were tricked," said Luo Beiling, who relocated her family to Qixingguan, a new district in Bijie, a city scattered in between mountains in Guizhou province, in 2018. She and other residents say commitments to provide good jobs never materialized, revealing how the sticky legacy of inequality – between China's affluent urban centers and its more rural outposts – remains.

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