SMU Associate Professor of Political Science John Donaldson said, “I was in poor villages at the end of 2019 and what I saw was … some things that were going great and other things that were utter disasters, that were worse than nothing.” Assoc Prof Donaldson said that he hoped the Chinese government would now raise the poverty line higher and announce its aim to further increase the livelihood of its people – but the political messaging of an “end to poverty” had made that hard. “I think the unfortunate thing of all this is that in many ways it is distracting from China’s actual accomplishments,” he said.