"There are two groups of poor people. One is, you don’t work hard. You deserve to be poor because you don’t work hard. Second is, you work hard but can’t succeed. I think we should help the second group of people."
There’s a saying, jiu ji bu jiu pin—‘We’ll help you if you have an emergency, but we cannot help you if you’re poor.’
Which is something I think about every time there's a global appeal after an earthquake or tidal wave, yet that contrasts with general indifference or outright hostility to helping with general poverty.
Just need to figure out how to pronounce that phrase correctly so I can drop it into conversation.
救急不救贫。
My non-expert analysis, emergency is the characters jiu4ji2. The character jiu4 is save, ji2 is urgent, so save+urgent = emergency. The character bu4 is no, negative, not. The next two characters are jiu4 (save, from before) and pin2 (poor). These don't combine as a single word and are read separately.
With all that in mind, I read it as "It's save+urgent, not save poor". Interesting play on words.
More direct translation is "help emergency, not help poor"