China has achieved a complete victory in its fight against poverty. In December 2020, President Xi Jinping announced that all remaining rural poor population had moved out of poverty under the current standard.

That means 98.99 million impoverished rural residents shed absolute poverty in just eight years.

Up until the late 1970s, more than 770 million people were living below the poverty line, according to World Bank data.

UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres hailed China's transformation as "the greatest anti-poverty achievement in history." "Every time I visit China, I am stunned by the speed of change and progress," he said.

Today, the question on everybody's mind is how exactly did China do it? What is China's secret?

To understand China's "secret," we must first look back to 1978, when the period of reform and opening up began. Former Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping, the chief architect behind China's pro-market reforms, famously said, "Poverty is not socialism. Socialism means eliminating poverty."

Since the economic reforms were launched, China has witnessed unprecedented economic growth. Decades of rapid growth have served as the bedrock of the country's development, without which China's poverty alleviation miracle would not have been possible. That said, economic development alone was not enough to completely eliminate poverty.

Ban Wei, deputy director of the Editor's Office of Xinhua News Agency, noted that the market is ultimately unable to deliver for those at the bottom. In an address to the International Forum on Poverty Governance and Development Towards Modernization, Ban explained that many of China's rural poor were excluded from the market for living in remote locations. The forum took place in Nujiang, Yunnan Province on May 18.

The market is a decisive and important resource-allocating factor, he said. "But market economics is based on efficiency and the market is unfriendly to those people in poverty."

Robert Walker, a professor with the China Academy of Social Management at Beijing Normal University unpacked this point further. "The market will always favor the city because the city brings economies of scale," he told Beijing-based media China Focus.

Under the leadership of President Xi, China waged an all-out war against poverty in late 2012. Officials in Beijing rallied the 91 million Communist Party of China members, together with the private sector and members of the general public in pursuit of one central aim: The elimination of absolute poverty by 2020.

Local authorities largely took the lead over regional development, adopting a two-pronged approach that weaved together large-scale infrastructure projects with targeted poverty alleviation measures.

Targeted poverty alleviation, explains producer and writer Robert Lawrence Kuhn, means individualized attention to people in poverty.

Using a standardized criterion—which looked at income, opportunity, and access to basic necessities—all households below a certain threshold were assessed on whether they met the classification of "extreme poverty." The root causes of a family's poverty were then explored, and a customized plan was developed to ensure all received the support needed.

"Every poor family has its own file, a literal notebook, each with its own targeted plan to lift each above the line of absolute poverty," said Kuhn.

More than 250,000 teams were dispatched to offer on-the-ground support. In total, more than 3 million people were sent to the country's most remote villages as special commissioners for poverty relief.

A common cause for many in poverty was found to be their location. Take Tibet Autonomous Region for example. Tibet has historically been China's poorest region, mainly due to its remote and hostile environment. Known as the Roof of the World, the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau sits at an average elevation of 4,572 meters, and is surrounded by one of the most formidable mountain ranges on the planet.

Living in the remote highlands meant being cut off from high-quality public amenities, such as healthcare and education. It meant being unable to grow a variety of stable crops. And it also meant being restricted from engaging in trade and commerce.

To alleviate this problem, local authorities launched an ambitious relocation program in 2013. Following the example of other remote regions in China that incorporated relocation programs with a mass-infrastructure drive, Tibet's most impoverished people were relocated to newly built communities with full access to essential services. More than 260,000 residents across the autonomous region took advantage of the scheme. Within six years, Tibet had shaken off absolute poverty.

In the hope that others can learn from its experience, China has committed to sharing its knowledge and methods with the developing world. It has made clear, however, that although China's methods worked for China, other countries must follow their own path in line with their unique challenges and environment.

The key to China's development, then, is not any particular policy or method, but rather its political economy. To understand China's success in poverty alleviation, researchers often refer to the five Ds. They are determined leadership, detailed blueprint, development-oriented, data-based governance, and decentralized delivery.

The determined leadership of President Xi and the Party has been noted by the UN secretary general and so bears not repeating. Its detailed blueprint refers to the plans sketched out by national and provincial-level leaders, some of which stretch for decades. Local leaders were largely responsible for the implementation and delivery of the detailed plans, and this is where decentralized delivery comes in.

Data-based governance refers to the more than 100 million files created on impoverished households. Development-oriented refers to the government's intervention in the market to promote more equitable growth.

With clear national priorities and using the power of the state to intervene, it is possible to organize the market in the people's interest while trying to control some of its disadvantages, Walker explained. The result is that "you can achieve the best of both worlds and benefit all sections of society," he added.

China's secret then, if it can be called a "secret," lies in its creation of a powerful synergy between the state, market and society. Socialism with Chinese characteristics has ultimately developed a new model of political economy with a proven track record in delivering high-quality development that is more fairly distributed across society.

(Print Edition Title: China's Poverty Alleviation)

Jamie Wright is a columnist at China Focus

Copyedited by Elsbeth van Paridon

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