Abstract
Development-oriented poverty reduction makes up a crucial part of what is now often billed as China’s unique development path, experience, and model. China’s success serves as an example for any society trying to eradicate poverty. Nevertheless, there will be a tough road ahead as the country enters a new phase of the war on poverty. In addition to a systematic overview of the country’s experience in development-oriented poverty reduction over recent decades, the China Poverty Reduction Report 2016 provides the outlook for poverty reduction over the coming years, including challenges the country will face as it enters the final stretch in the race to realize moderate prosperity for all. The report also presents discussions of policy options for meeting the government’s poverty reduction targets by 2020 within the precision-targeting strategy framework.
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Notes
- 1.
This report is based on the joint research efforts of the project team. It is written by Guobao Wu Ph.D., Researcher at the Rural Development Research Institute, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS), Director of the CASS Center for Poverty Studies, Chief Researcher at the CASS Innovation Project “In Search of Accurate Policy Solutions to Poverty,” Professor at CASS Graduate School, Wu’s main fields of research include poverty reduction, microcredit, rural development, and rural well-being.
- 2.
Wu (2014).
- 3.
Youyi (1957).
- 4.
National Bureau of Statistics (1984).
- 5.
UNICEF noted in their 1980–1981 Annual Report that China’s “barefoot doctors” provided basic care to economically underdeveloped rural communities, and this system can serve as an example for other developing countries. The World Bank and the World Health Organization also called China’s rural medical cooperative system “the only workable model for developing countries capable of solving the problem of financing healthcare.”
- 6.
National Bureau of Statistics: http://data.stats.gov.cn/easyquery.htm?cn=C01.
- 7.
Binbin (1993).
- 8.
In 1992, the Chinese government set the poverty line at per capita net annual income of 200 yuan based on 1984 prices, which is supposed to guarantee subsistence.
- 9.
Data come from a 1973–1975 three-year national retrospective survey on cancer deaths, Ministry of Health of the People’s Republic of China, Public Health Statistical Yearbook of China 2013.
- 10.
National Bureau of Statistics Household Survey Office: China’s Rural Poverty Monitoring Report (2015), Beijing, Zhongguo Tongji Chubanshe, 2015.
- 11.
National Bureau of Statistics: Rural Statistical Yearbook of China, 1999, Beijing: Zhongguo Tongji Chubanshe, 1999.
- 12.
Division of Population and Science and Technology Statistics, National Bureau of Statistics, Finance Division, Ministry of Labor and Social Security: Labor Statistics Yearbook of China (2003), Zhongguo Tongji Chubanshe, 2003.
- 13.
National Bureau of Statistics: Rural Household Survey Yearbook of China (2000), Zhongguo Tongji Chubanshe, 2000.
- 14.
National Bureau of Household Survey Office, China’s Rural Poverty Monitoring Report (2015), Beijing: Zhongguo Tongji Chubanshe, 2015.
- 15.
A number of practices that were first tried in this area would later be emulated across the country, including development-oriented poverty reduction, establishment of a poverty registry, providing assistance directly to individual households, and improving management of aid money.
- 16.
State Council’s Office of the Leading Group for Economic Development of Poor Areas, Outline of Economic Development in China’s Poverty-Stricken Areas, Zhongguo Nongye Chubanshe, 1989.
- 17.
The criterion used by the Chinese government to determine the size of China’s rural poor was so low that it assumed an 85% share of household income going toward food expenditure. By this standard, the poverty line offered little more than bare subsistence.
- 18.
State Council’s Office of the Leading Group for Economic Development of Poor Areas, Outline of Poverty Reduction Development in China, Zhongguo Caizheng Jingji Chubanshe, 2006.
- 19.
Since 1994, annual fiscal expenditure toward Work-for-Aid program was 4 billion yuan, an increase of 2.7 billion yuan over the 1986–1993 period.
- 20.
These include both tax relief and subsidies for agricultural production. The former includes either lowering the rates or eliminating a number of agricultural taxes, while the latter includes subsidies for food production, comprehensive agricultural production, utilization of improved seeds, and purchasing agricultural machinery.
- 21.
PRC Ministry of Civil Affairs, A December 2010 Operational Survey of the Minimum Living Allowance Program for Rural Areas, http://files2.mca.gov.cn/cws/201107/20110711152301813.htm.
- 22.
“Minimum Living Allowance in Counties and higher-level units: December 2011,” PRC Ministry of Civil Affairs, http://files2.mca.gov.cn/cws/201501/20150126172425998.htm.
- 23.
This is the author’s own calculation using data from the 2006 Household Survey as well as other resources.
- 24.
The social structure in rural China has two levels. On the grassroots level is community or residential settlement, which is called natural village or subvillage while another is administratively designated village which is on the bottom rung of the administrative hierarchy.
- 25.
These include Poverty Alleviation and Development Office, Department of Finance, Development and Reform Committee, and Ethnic Affairs Commission, at different levels.
- 26.
The list of poor counties in the country was updated in 2011, albeit with minimal change, making this comparison legitimate. In addition, even though starting in 2013, the National Bureau of Statistics adopted a new set of methods and indices in the collection of data and its statistical treatment, replacing, among other things, net income with disposable income when estimating rural income, the difference between their values has negligible impact on the result of the comparison.
- 27.
The bottom 80% rural population in 1980 was living in poverty by current official poverty line.
- 28.
According to data collected by the rural migrant worker monitoring survey conducted by the National Bureau of Statistics, the percent of rural migrant workers who found jobs within their native province was 37% in 2009, and 46.5% in 2015.
- 29.
Bezemer: 2006 No. 1.The same trends can be extrapolated from longitudinal data on poverty rates in different countries released by the World Bank. See: PovcalNet: the online tool for poverty measurement developed by the Development Research Group of the World Bank, http://iresearch.worldbank.org/PovcalNet/index.htm?1.
- 30.
No criterion exists specifically for determining the poverty line for China’s urban areas since the notion is officially deemed inapplicable in these areas. According to calculations based on the poverty line criterion used by the World Bank in making international comparisons, the rate of poverty in urban China has continued to decline since 1981. See: PovcalNet: the online tool for poverty measurement developed by the Development Research Group of the World Bank, http://iresearch.worldbank.org/PovcalNet/index.htm?1.
- 31.
Data on the number of laborers that exited agriculture in 1980 are from National Bureau of Statistics Household Survey Office, China’s Rural Poverty Monitoring Report (2015), Beijing: Zhongguo Tongji Chubanshe, 2015.
- 32.
According to NBS data, the number of laborers exiting agriculture grew by 412 million between 1980 and 2015.
- 33.
The first datum comes from the NBS website; and the second one from NBS annual rural migrant worker monitoring report for the 2011–2015 period.
- 34.
It has been a matter of contention both inside and outside China whether a minimum wage standard should be introduced in China sooner rather than later. However, fairly strong empirical evidence exists to suggest that the government’s decision to let the market set wage levels has for all practical purposes helped advance the causes of promoting nonfarm employment among the poor and poverty reduction.
- 35.
According to NBS monitoring data on rural migrant workers, the percent of them who work in the construction industry is around 17% in 2008–2012, and rose to more than 21% in 2013–2015. Between 2008 and 2015 construction accounted for 12% of urban jobs in the country as a whole.
- 36.
Wu et al. (2011).
- 37.
According the United Nations rankings, in 1980, China ranked 156th, 83rd and 85th internationally in terms of per capita GDP, life expectancy and average number of years spent in formal schooling. See: http://hdr.undp.org/en/data.
- 38.
For example, the PRC Ministry of Health released in 2012 “Guiding Opinion on Facilitating Poverty Reduction by means of Promoting Heath and Healthcare.”
- 39.
Data on the extra-county sources of poverty reduction funds for poverty-stricken counties and how they are used have been available in each edition of Poverty in Rural China Monitoring Report, from different years, compiled and published annually by National Bureau of Statistics, since 2000.
- 40.
- 41.
The program was launched, with the blessings of The United Front Work Department of CPC Central Committee and the All China Federation of Industry and Commerce, by a group of influential individuals in the private sector in 1995 to rally behind the then recently launched “Lifting Eighty Million out of Poverty within Seven Years” program.
- 42.
Martin Ravallion and Shaohua Chen: “China’s (Uneven) Progress Against Poverty,” WPS3408, World Bank; Chuliang Luo, “Dynamic Changes in Rural Poverty,” Jingji Yanjiu, No. 5, 2010, 123–138.
- 43.
Wu et al. (2010).
- 44.
National Bureau of Statistics Household Survey Department, Main Findings of China’s Rural Poverty Monitoring Survey (2015), for internal circulation only.
- 45.
“Water shortage” here refers to a state in which the distance between a residential area and the nearest water source is greater than 1 km in horizontal distance or 100 m in vertical distance, and in which an area sees no precipitation for 70–100 consecutive days in a normal year.
- 46.
National Bureau of Statistics: http://data.stats.gov.cn/easyquery.htm?cn=C01.
- 47.
National Bureau of Statistics Household Survey Department (2015).
- 48.
National Bureau of Statistics Household Survey Office (2015).
- 49.
These three have been chosen for this analysis because on the one hand they are key dimensions of human development and on the other the unavailability of disaggregated data by age group and sex for many countries makes impossible analysis of such indicators as children and maternal death rates. All of these three indices can be calculated by weighting the population size of each country.
- 50.
This calculation covers only 143 countries in the world for which complete HDI and census data are available.
- 51.
According to the definition jointly formulated by the World Health Organization (WHO) and United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) to be used for monitoring progress toward the millennium development goals, “improved drinking water sources” can include any of the following: piped household water, protected dug wells, boreholes, rainwater collection, and bottled water.
- 52.
PRC Ministry of Health, China Health and Family Planning Statistical Yearbook (2013), Zhongguo Xiehe Yike Daxue Chubanshe.
- 53.
Since census data on children under five are not available, the global average is calculated by weighting the population of each country. But because countries vary in age structure, so too do they vary in the proportion of the under-five population. As such some deviation in the resultant global average is inevitable. On the whole, developing countries, which account for a large share of world’s total population, have more children under the age of five as a percent of the country’s total population, the weighted global average may be lower than what it actually is. Nonetheless, this does not invalidate the general conclusions drawn here.
- 54.
After 2013, the National Bureau of Statistics no longer released official data on per capita rural net income. Estimates based on per capita net rural income obtained from the “Statistical Communiqué of the People’s Republic of China on the 2015 National Economic and Social Development” and per capita disposable rural income available on the NBS website indicate that per capita disposable income is about 6% higher than per capita net income for the rural population. This puts the 2014 poverty line for the rural population such as calculated on the basis of per capita disposable income at 2968 yuan.
- 55.
The monthly payment under the Minimum Living Allowance Program for rural areas and the social pension insurance program were 14% and 23%, respectively, higher in 2015 than in 2014.
- 56.
Using 1978 prices, the margin of poverty reduction per 10,000 yuan worth of GDP fell from 0.6 in 2015 1 to 0.34 in 2011, and the downward trend is expected to continue.
- 57.
National Bureau of Statistics, “Statistical Communiqué of the People’s Republic of China on the 2015 National Economic and Social Development,” http://www.stats.gov.cn/tjsj/zxfb/201602/t20160229_1323991.html.
- 58.
Including various preferential policies introduced by central and local governments.
- 59.
Developed by Youcheng Foundation in conjunction with a number of schools in Beijing, the so-called co-teaching model refers to a practice, in which teachers from education resource-rich areas are matched up one-on-one with those from areas with a shortage of such resource to co-teach certain courses in rural schools. The former would do the teaching long-distance, while the other teacher would provide on-site assistance at the school. Results from pilots show that the model has notable positive effects on the teaching of math and English.
- 60.
To date, China Development Bank has committed a total of 1.5 trillion yuan to be used for this purpose over the 13th Five-year Plan period, and the number for the Agricultural Bank of China is 3 trillion yuan.
- 61.
For example, currently the sole criterion used for deciding whether a county can be delisted from the poverty registry is the rate of poverty, and the decision does not take into consideration such factors as either the condition of infrastructure or the level of social services in the county.
- 62.
A time lag between execution and full release of effects is a common phenomenon in many poverty alleviation programs and projects. Therefore, it is particularly important for work and funding plans for these programs and project to be made as early as feasible so as to maximize their effectiveness.
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Research Group of Poverty Alleviation and Development of Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. (2022). General Report. In: Li, P., Wei, H., Wu, G. (eds) Research on Poverty Reduction in China. International Research on Poverty Reduction. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-7144-9_1
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