I remember when I was very young (don't actually remember I was like 2) when Katrina hit Florida and New Orleans and Bush left our people to starve and die, didn't rebuild shit and allocated like a few million at most for aid.
Chad China response to natural disasters sending out the whole PLA and disaster teams to find every single citizen in sub-zero weather
That rules so hard, I want to be a party member and help with real shit
When I was growing up, we had family friends that were CPC cadres. Their jobs involved going to rural areas to assess the material conditions and improve the lives of disadvantaged people. Allocating funding and helping construct/renovate schools and medical clinics in the boondocks all the way to going to remote mountain homes to help repair roofing or heating for elderly residents.
In other words, praxis. Unburdened with means testing or bureaucracy, party members will travel 5 hours to a remote mountain village to go to an individual home, assess the situation and go like "oh hey yeah I'll be back next week to fix the roof so it won't leak when the rain gets too heavy, I can also add insulation so it'll be warmer in winter :)" and request funding to build a clinic so they don't have to travel 5hrs to get medical treatment.
Once he came back with a fucktonne of peaches because the villagers he lived with for a few months physically stood in front of his car and wouldn't let him leave without taking some form of present for improving the village.
Anyway, twitter libs say it's a failed ideology so idk, I guess we must abandon communism.
Your family friends are genuine heroes, and I'd love to ask about them.
Fairly standard for cadres (干部). 为人民服务
A similar thing is shown in this video of a cadre who lived among the people in a rural Xinjiang village for over 4 years as a part of China's poverty alleviation program saying farewell to the villagers.
Eradicating absolute poverty in a country as large as China isn't just throwing money at the problem, but addressing the material needs of the people and building infrastructure and utilities on a case by case basis, and that's hard to do without embedding yourself in their communities for months to years at a time.