Remember when first hearing about "participatory development" thinking "only the middle class would need a whole theory to realise that poor people aren't thick or clueless about their situation."
We had a microfinance component in the projects we were doing, which ditched most of the dogma and basically ended up being a way for village women to buy piglets on tick to rear and make some money on; later attended various microfinance conferences etc. and realised it really is full of free market headbangers who think it's just a case of providing the bootstraps so everyone can pull themselves up by magic - where we worked lots of villages were three hours walk up a mountain from the nearest road and further than that from a market. You must have heard the term "development tourism" too - like an extended gap year where middle class types get to do something touchy-feely amongst the exotics. Even more interesting was meeting local technicians etc. who helped with the training on microhydro power projects and the like - they said they'd been out and about doing just this sort of peer training during China's collective era but rarely got a chance to get out of the county town post-reform as their bosses concentrated on monetising stuff (rural energy office selling solar water heaters, for example) and only gave projects to political clients in the village who nine times out of ten were the best-off, best connected anyway.
Would have to think on a considered reply to the "Go West: strategy thing, but it is well seen that so much of the money ended up going to Chongqing (saw some figures that said there was more money PPP in five years than the Marshall Plan!) which was already a major metropolis and was going to get included in the next wave of capital investment either way (though obv this helped create the "favourable conditions" just as the tax breaks etc in Shenzhen did back when).
And they need the ones the advertisers can sell expensive tat to.
