Published : 26/09/2024
Since the founding of the People's Republic of China (PRC) 75 years ago, the country has weathered storms and undergone tremendous changes.
This series, "Extraordinary 75 Years", provides a deep dive in China's achievements and breakthroughs over the past 75 years.
This article, as the 3rd one of the Chapter of Political and Economic, takes you through how the "miracle" of lifting 800 million people out of poverty has been achieved.
From 2012 to 2021, in China, one person crossed the poverty line every 3 seconds on average. This is seen as a miracle. How did China do it?
The start of poverty reduction
Before the founding of New China, people's lives were far from ideal. At that time, the agricultural population accounted for about 88% of the total population, of which more than 50% were poor peasants and hired laborers in a state of having no or little land, cultivating only about 14% of the total arable land.
At the beginning of the founding of New China, the government started land reform in 1950, changing the feudal land system into a system of land ownership by farmers.
By 1953, land reform was implemented in most parts of the country, with more than 300 million farmers receiving about 700 million acres of land free of charge and no longer having to pay about 30 million tonnes of grain rent to landlords each year. This greatly liberated the productivity of rural areas and took the first step in China's poverty reduction.
From 1953 to 1956, the government conducted socialist transformation of agriculture, handicrafts, and capitalist industry and commerce, establishing the basic socialist system to provide the most basic institutional guarantee for solving the problem of poverty.
At the same time, the government provided social relief to particularly impoverished populations. According to statistics, in 1952, over 1.2 million people in 152 cities across the country received regular relief throughout the year.
From relief to poverty alleviation
After the Reform and Opening-up in 1978, China's economy developed rapidly, and the country began to explore new paths for poverty alleviation.
In 1986, the State Council's Leading Group for Economic Development of Poverty-Stricken Areas was formally established and proposed a "new way of development." In the same year, China formulated its first national poverty standard, setting the annual per capita net income of farmers at 206 RMB, and established key areas and poverty counties.
From this point on, an organised and planned large-scale poverty alleviation and development was launched nationwide, marking the beginning of a new historical period for poverty alleviation.
In 1994, the State Council issued the an alleviation program, which was the first national poverty alleviation development program in the history of the founding of New China with clear goals, clear targets, clear measures, and clear timelines.
The program clearly proposed the principle of "developmental poverty alleviation," stating the need to "rely on technological progress, develop and utilise local resources, and develop commodity production," with the hope of fundamentally solving the food and clothing problem for 80 million rural poor people within 7 years.
In 2000, in response to social and economic development, China adjusted the poverty line. Based on the new standards, the rural poor population in China decreased from 250 million in 1978 to 32.09 million in 2000, and the poverty incidence rate dropped from about 30.7% to 3.5%.
New stage in the fight against poverty
In 2011, China adjusted the poverty line for the third time, raising it to an annual per capita income of 2,300 RMB. Under the new standard, the number of poor people in China was adjusted to 122 million.
At the end of 2012, after the 18th National Congress of the Communist Party of China, General Secretary Xi Jinping stated that "not a single poor area or poor person should be left behind."
Thus began the eight-year fight against poverty, regarded as the largest scale poverty reduction campaign in human history.
In 2013, during an inspection of Shibadong Village in Huayuan County, Hunan Province, Xi Jinping first proposed the concept of "seeking truth from facts, adapting measures to local conditions, classifying guidance, and targeted poverty alleviation," which was seen as the "magic weapon" for China to win the battle against poverty.
The so-called "targeted poverty alleviation" mainly addressed the questions of "who should be supported, who will provide support, and how support will be provided."
The state established archives for the poor population, with information accurately tracked to each village, household, and individual, and in 2015 established a national unified poverty alleviation development information system to provide data support for targeted poverty alleviation.
To address the issue of "who will provide support," the state established a work mechanism focusing on key areas, with efforts extending to villages, and poverty alleviation reaching households.
By 2015, each poor village was assigned a resident working team, and each poor household was assigned a corresponding responsible helper.
By the end of 2020, a total of 255,000 resident working teams and more than 3 million first secretaries and resident cadres were dispatched to the frontline of poverty alleviation nationwide.
Due to the vast differences in the types and causes of poverty, poverty alleviation efforts need to be tailored to local conditions, and solutions must be applied accordingly.
The government implements different policies in different regions, including industrial poverty alleviation, relocation, ecological poverty alleviation, technological poverty alleviation, educational poverty alleviation, and so on, aiming to shift from "blood transfusion" to "blood creation."
Developing industries such as e-commerce, photovoltaics, and tourism for poverty alleviation is considered the most direct method. By the end of 2020, more than 300,000 various industrial bases had been built in impoverished areas, creating 12,000 specialty agricultural product brands, and 14,400 city-level or higher leading enterprises.
For some impoverished populations living in harsh environments, the government implements "relocation projects," establishing new resettlement areas, poverty alleviation workshops, educational institutions, etc., to provide new housing while also creating employment and educational opportunities.
By the end of 2020, approximately 35,000 centralised resettlement areas had been built in impoverished areas, with more than 2.66 million housing units, and over 9.6 million people had moved into new homes and lifted themselves out of poverty, among which the labor employment rate reached 73.7%.
At the same time, the government has also invested significant human and material resources to improve infrastructure in impoverished areas, solving difficulties related to transportation, electricity, water, and communication, breaking development constraints.
By the end of 2020, 1.1 million kilometres of rural roads had been newly built or reconstructed in impoverished areas nationwide, with 35,000 kilometres of new railway mileage; all county-level administrative regions nationwide were connected to the major power grid, and the proportion of poverty-stricken villages with access to electricity reached 100%; fiber optic and 4G communications covered 98% of poverty-stricken villages.
From 2012 to 2020, the Chinese government invested a total of 1.6 trillion RMB in special poverty alleviation funds, significantly improving living conditions in impoverished areas and greatly increasing the income levels of impoverished populations, with an annual per capita income exceeding 10,000 RMB.
In 2021, China announced the elimination of absolute poverty, with all 98.99 million impoverished people and 832 impoverished counties successfully lifted out of poverty under the current standards.
Consolidating poverty alleviation achievements
Starting in 2021, the Chinese government established a five-year transition period to consolidate poverty alleviation achievements and ensure that there is no return to poverty.
In 2023, the employment scale of the population lifted out of poverty in China was approximately 33.96 million, exceeding the target.
According to the World Bank's international poverty standard (1.9 USD per person per day), since the Reform and Opening-up, China has lifted 800 million people out of poverty, achieving the poverty reduction goal of the United Nations 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development ten years ahead of schedule.
Such a "poverty alleviation miracle" also provides a "Chinese solution" to human poverty reduction. According to a World Bank research report, the Belt and Road Initiative proposed by China has lifted 7.6 million people in relevant countries and regions out of extreme poverty.