Nation utilizes population data to improve social assistance

An unemployed leukemia patient in Liuzhou, Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region, was relieved to hear that the local government had granted her medical assistance and other temporary help.

Rather than seeking social assistance on her own, the patient, surnamed Huang, was instead contacted by local civil affairs authorities after they reviewed a list of patients with excessive medical expenses.

According to the Liuzhou Big Data Development Bureau, the city has integrated data shared by multiple departments, such as medical insurance and human resources, to establish an early warning system for low-income people in need of assistance.

Wang Xiaohui, an official with the bureau, said the move had "greatly improved the efficiency of government service compared to the traditional way of locating these people through manual processing of relevant information".

Liuzhou and a number of other cities around China responded to a central government call in October for the dynamic monitoring of the low-income population to be strengthened and the tiered and classified social assistance system improved.

A central government guideline categorizes low-income people in need of assistance into different tiers based on their degree of difficulty. The assistance includes support for basic livelihood, medical care, education, housing, employment, disaster relief and emergency support.

Tang Chengpei, vice-minister of civil affairs, said that in addition to channels that encourage low-income families to apply for social assistance, China should leverage big data shared across different departments and dispatch more grassroots workers to households to identify those in need.

Jiang Wei, director of the Ministry of Civil Affairs' social assistance department, said local authorities across China have made progress in identifying low-income populations and developing a platform for dynamic monitoring of the group.

The tiered and classified platform aggregates information from different systems, including social assistance and household financial situations, covering the whole country with regular updates, Jiang said.

The number of low-income people being monitored on the information platform topped 80 million in March of this year, accounting for 5.7 percent of China's population, according to the ministry.

"Those being monitored do not necessarily need assistance," said Jiang."The purpose of monitoring is to detect risks at an early stage and sound alarms."

Over the years, China has also compared school roll information with population data on a regular basis to detect dropout students, particularly around the start of each new semester, according to the Ministry of Education.

Ma Jiabin, director of the ministry's department of basic education, said China has built a nationwide assistance network covering poor students of different age groups to ensure that no one drops out of school due to financial difficulties.

Yang Lixiong, a professor of social security studies at Renmin University of China, said such measures help guarantee public living standards in China and consolidate the country's hard-won poverty alleviation results while laying the foundation for the drive to achieve common prosperity.