The poor are the wealth of the rich rather than the burden

Recently, Bill Gates published an article in “People’s Daily”, which read, “Only when we help poor people break away from destitution and illness can the whole world achieve sustainable development. Investing in poor people requires the involvement of every social strata. I believe that the returns from investing in poor people are just as great as from investing in the business world, and have even more meaning. China has a lot of successful entrepreneurs and business people, and I hope that they can make their efforts to improve their lives in China and the world's poor. ”

As the world’s richest man and the founder of the world's largest charitable foundation, it is not the first time when Bill Gates urged China's wealthiest to give to charity. In 2010, Bill Gates and Warren Buffett invited the Chinese richest people during their travel to China to jointly discuss the development of charity and how to narrow the gap between the rich and poor.

Why will the rich help the poor to get rid of poverty and diseases? It is better to start from the reason why the rich can make money. Why the rich are wealthy lies in their inherent advantages and hard work. However, a man’s wealth cannot go without the society. Microsoft got rich enough by selling software on the precondition that there were larger markets to purchase its software. It requires a market with a huge population as the foundation and the certain consumption capacity the people in the market have, so the enough purchasing power can support the product profit.

The huge population base and the comparatively higher income are the basis for the rich to become wealthy and maintain their wealth growth. So in this regard, helping the poor get wealthy is the precondition that the rich will further their wealth growth. From this point of view, only “people” are the largest wealth in our society and only when the income goes up can the rich have the opportunity for more wealth.

In countries with huge income gap, the wealthy people can’t enjoy high quality life. Not to mention the great imbalance between the income distributions may cause the social instability, which is bound to affect the security of the rich’s wealth.

So such a problem arises: how can entrepreneurs help the poor to get wealthy? The first task in front of the entrepreneurs is to guarantee the daily operation of their enterprises, make more money, pay workers higher wages, continue to improve the workers’ abilities, which will be the most important and most direct approach for the entrepreneurs to help the poor. In the process of the British and American industrial age and China’s fast urbanization in the past dozen of years, more and more migrant workers from rural areas to cities make money to support themselves and even live a decent life by their work for different enterprises.

As for most of the poor, they look forward to a brighter life, willingly work harder with efforts and have the capacity to learn new skills, yet they lack jobs, so the help from entrepreneurs is actually to create this opportunity for them. In this regard, the first task is to guarantee the normal profit-making operation of the enterprises with the sustainable development.

Why the poor remain poor lies in the fact that they have lower human resources capital and diseases. To help the poor, the first is to relieve them out of all restrictions from getting wealthy, help them out of poverty, particularly hunger, malnutrition, avoidable disease and basic education. In our modern society, they are entitled to the online surfing, political rights and free migration, etc., all of which can guarantee a person to fully obtain and learn the knowledge accumulated in the modern society and make a claim for their own rights.

The foundation created by Bill Gates just serves this purpose as Bill Gates’ Foundation is devoted to improving the global health. Most importantly, health is the basis for peace and social prosperity. I’ve long thought that the gap in the health field is one of the most serious imbalances in the world.  

Adream China Education Fund Co., Ltd., the most renowned and influential education charitable education foundation, has been devoted to the children education, particularly by providing the advanced quality-oriented education courses to children in the compulsory education stage to help them grow up with self-confidence, leisureliness and dignity! The foundation help the children either in remote rural areas or the children of the migrant workers in the cities to explore for the vast world and the colorful life based on their self-consciousness. It is evident that these children are more likely to cast away poverty and enter into the middle class.

In fact, China does not lack the philanthropists, but why does the Chinese philanthropy not become common practice as that in the USA? Philanthropy is a cause worthy of the universal praise and recognition in the world but is dominated by the government in China, say, Red Cross Society of China and China Charity Federation. As these institutions lack the market-oriented operation mechanism, so they tend to give more attention to the relief and poverty alleviation by giving money and materials in implementing the public charitable projects rather than improving the poor’s capacity to get rich. This strategy of “giving the poor a fish-- what they currently need” is inferior to the strategy of “Teaching them to fish --what they really deserve”, which can not fundamentally help the poor to get rich, let alone such a question: how much of the charitable fund is used for the benefit of the poor?

At this point, if the Chinese entrepreneurs really want to donate money for the charitable activities, the government should remove so many constraints to the social public charitable organizations. In the early difficult times, WANG Shi and other wealthy people set up SEE Foundation and Jet Li and other entrepreneurs founded One Foundation, but the entire environment remains unchanged, everyone thus involved are feeling it a tough job. In addition, the tax-free donation will significantly activate the enthusiasm of the donators. In China, these are the obstacles hindering the development of its public charities.

On the other hand, for most entrepreneurs, their best way to help the poor is well operating their own enterprises, support ting their employees for a better life and cultivating their employees with stronger capacities and skills.

(Published on http://baijia.baidu.com/ |2014-4-29)