Building the rural future and alleviating rural poverty

One of the biggest policy successes in the 70+-year history of the PRC has been the poverty alleviation programme. It claims to have lifted out of poverty nearly 100 million impoverished rural residents in 832 counties and 228,000 villages well ahead of its original target date of 2030. A major push to tackle rural poverty was launched in 2013 with three million first local Party secretaries and resident working team members selected and dispatched to carry out targeted poverty reduction. Targeting was possible because of a national identification and registration system that recognised those villages in need of alleviation measures, with Guangxi, Guizhou, Hunan, Sichuan and Yunnan highlighted as provinces with substantial areas of poverty. Poverty alleviation included policies aimed at tackling housing, education, and health. In 2015 the poverty threshold was revised, with the aim at this time being to move 70 million out of rural poverty as part of President Xi Jinping’s ambitious programme. The focus on poverty has been developed alongside a longer-term plan, ‘Building a New Socialist Countryside’, established in 2006. This combined a new fiscal system of transfer payments to poor local governments with administrative reforms, intensified internal project evaluation, and efforts to increase rural income through a mixture of infrastructural investment, agricultural specialisation, the expansion of social welfare, and accelerated urbanisation. The chapter discusses the various measures incorporated in poverty alleviation and operating since 2006, highlighting the dominant role of the CCP, and its creation of winners as well as losers amongst the rural population. Another rural initiative is the 2017 Rural Revitalisation Strategy, aiming to transform the relationship between town and country, referred to in terms of integrating rural and urban development. Following the progress achieved in the poverty alleviation strategy, the emphasis was switched to this strategy in 2021 with the creation of a new agency to promote rural vitalisation. Vitalisation is an attempt to balance conflicting roles played by rural areas, but essentially by developing better linkages between cities and the countryside.