China's poverty alleviation is a major achievement for not just for the country itself, but it also carries significance worldwide. In 2018, the former UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said in a joint interview with the Chinese media that China has helped the United Nations achieve its poverty reduction goals under the Millennium Development Goals. When talking about China's achievements in the past four decades after reform and opening up, Ban Ki-moon said that reform and opening-up have lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. In this process, not only the Chinese people but also the people of other countries were benefited. The World Bank has also pointed out that developing countries have achieved the poverty reduction in the Millennium Development Goals in 2010, halving the extreme poverty rate based on the 1990 level. Concerning this, Ban pointed out, "if we look at the statistics internally, it is because of China".
In the past 40 years of reform and opening-up, the income level of rural residents in China has continued to show improvement, with the living standard being improved significantly and the number of poor people decreased drastically. China is now moving towards the elimination of absolute poverty. Since the reform and opening-up, China's rural poor have decreased by 740 million. According to the current rural poverty standard and based on the rural household registration population, the incidence of rural poverty was about 97.5% at the end of 1978, and the population with rural poverty was 770 million. Comparatively, the rural poverty rate was 3.1% at the end of 2017, and the poverty population was 30.46 million. From 1978 to 2017, the number of rural poor in China has decreased by 740 million, and the annual average poverty reduction population was close to 19 million. The incidence of rural poverty fell by 94.4 percentage points, with an average annual decline of 2.4 percentage points.
Since the 18th National Congress of the Communist Party of China, the entire country has been mobilized to eliminate poverty. The effectiveness of poverty alleviation is rather remarkable and decisive progress has been made. According to the current poverty standard, the number of people who achieved rural poverty reduction in China from 2013 to 2017 was 16.5 million, 12.32 million, 14.42 million, 12.4 million, and 12.89 million respectively. Not only did the annual poverty reduction number exceed 10 million, it also broke the previous new standards. After the implementation of the measures, the number of people who have been out of poverty has been declining year by year. In the past 5 years, the rural area has reduced poverty by 68.53 million. The poverty reduction rate is close to 70%, and the average annual poverty reduction is 13.7 million. The incidence of poverty has also dropped from 10.2% at the end of 2012 to 3.1% at the end of 2017. In 17 provinces of China, the incidence has fallen below 3%.
China's poverty alleviation has clearly achieved great success, but not without its own issues. The first issue is the relationship between poverty alleviation and rural revitalization. The second issue is the relationship between urbanization and rural revitalization.
"Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime", this familiar good old wisdom prompted some to think of solving the problem of poverty alleviation through rural revitalization to avoid the rebound of poverty. The logic behind this is that as long as the rural industry is revitalized, the poor will have a job. They will then have money, and there will be guarantees for poverty alleviation. The problem is that not all poor people in China have the ability to work. Statistics have revealed a frightful truth. In China, there are 40.6 million demented or disabled people who have no ability to work. In addition, according to the data released by the Chinese National Center for Mental Health in 2009, the number of people with various mental illnesses in the country is over 100 million, of which the number of patients with severe mental illness has exceeded 16 million. This part of the population basically has no working ability. What is particularly noteworthy is that China's illiteracy rate has not fallen in the past decade. In fact, it has rebounded sharply after falling to 4%, 4.08% in 2010, 4.60% in 2013, and 5.28% in 2017, which means there are still 60 million people in China who are simply illiterate. Even if these populations have certain working abilities, they will not get good-paying jobs. For them, it is still rather difficult to break out of poverty.
Therefore, teaching the poor to fish only works in theory. In practice, many of them do not have the ability to work.
Concerning the relationship between urbanization and rural revitalization, the latter requires the population to stay in the countryside, and even to attract the urban population to relocate to the countryside for the rural industry to be revitalized. The problem is that this contradicts with urbanization. Urbanization requires the populations flowing to towns and cities, thereby solving poverty issues through the higher job opportunities in urban areas. Because of such contradictions, whether it is rural revitalization or urbanization, only certain populations in some areas can be lifted out of poverty. To solve the problem of poverty alleviation under higher standards, both rural revitalization and urbanization will have their limits.
What then, are the approaches to be taken to ensure sustainability in poverty alleviation?
China will need to adopt pragmatic attitude to solve this issue. The most difficult of the poor populations should be solved by increasing the supply of welfare. In other words, the state's welfare system must maintain continuous progress, which is the core and key to poverty alleviation. In many places, helping the poor by paying directly is a simple method, but it is very necessary for many low-end poor people who are disabled and demented. This is a kind of welfare supply, though it belongs to a non-institutionalized type. When the local government has money, such welfare can be provided. When the opposite happens, welfare will naturally be unavailable. Therefore, the real solution depends on the institutionalized welfare system at the national level. Without such a system guarantee, poverty alleviation will still leave many poor communities in the dark and be unable to aid all of them.
Final analysis conclusion:
Poverty alleviation in China is a complex and special social welfare work. The Chinese authorities will need to work on achieving institutional results, rather than adopt the approach of project-based poverty alleviation.
