Elsevier

Journal of Rural Studies

Volume 93, July 2022, Pages 430-440
Journal of Rural Studies

Targeted poverty alleviation and its practices in rural China: A case study of Fuping county, Hebei Province

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrurstud.2019.01.007Get rights and content

Highlights

  • We systematically reviewed the history of poverty alleviation and development in rural China.

  • The connotations of targeted poverty alleviation were explained.

  • We discussed the main measures of targeted poverty alleviation in Fuping and analyzed the mechanism behind them.

  • Key problems that need attention in the practice of antipoverty are suggested.

  • A framework including government guidance, society promotion and farmer participation is important in antipoverty.

Abstract

After nearly seventy years of poverty alleviation, China has basically solved the problem of providing food and clothing to the rural poor. However, the islanding effect of the distribution of the poor and the marginal diminishing effect of the antipoverty resources, which restrict the effects of poverty-eliminating strategies, are increasingly obvious. In this context, targeted poverty alleviation is designed by the Chinese central government. Therefore, it is necessary to systematically analyse targeted poverty alleviation and explore the mechanism of its practices. In addition to reviewing the process of antipoverty in rural China, this study investigated the connotation of targeted poverty alleviation and considered the case of Fuping in Hebei Province to explore targeted antipoverty practices. Results showed that poverty alleviation in rural China could be divided into six stages, and the essence of targeted poverty alleviation lied in helping those who truly needed help and achieving genuine outcomes by accurately identifying and assisting poverty-stricken households, accurately managing objects and measures and accurately assessing antipoverty effectiveness. The practices of targeted poverty alleviation in Fuping county mainly involved industrial development, resettlement assistance, financial and educational development, together with medical security and land consolidation, all of which built an endogenous and sustainable mechanism enabling regional development. This study suggests that targeted poverty alleviation is an innovative strategy which is suitable for overcoming the islanding effect of poverty distribution and helping policymakers formulate detailed and targeted measures to eliminate poverty.

Introduction

Poverty has long been a global problem (Haushofer and Fehr, 2014; Liu et al., 2017), and eradicating poverty has become one of the severest challenges faced by developing countries in achieving sustainable development (UN, 2015b). According to the Millennium Development Goals Report 2015, despite significant progress in global poverty reduction, over 836.0 million people continued to live in extreme poverty in 2015, lacking access to adequate food, clean drinking water and sanitation (UN, 2015a). Poverty used to be considered as an economic phenomenon and referred to conditions under which individuals or households could not afford basic living necessities (Hagenaars and van Praag, 1985; Liu et al., 2017). From a comprehensive perspective, poverty not only refers to the scarcity of material, social and cultural resources, but also involves the lack of capabilities, opportunities and access to social services (Sen, 1976; Alkire and Foster, 2011; Guo et al., 2018). Scholars have developed a series of methods for measuring poverty, including the income-consumption standard (Ravallion et al., 1991), human development index (HDI) (UNDP, 2010) and multidimensional poverty index (MPI) (Alkire, 2011; Alkire and Foster, 2011). MPI, in particular, has been widely used to reveal poverty in different regions (Ayala et al., 2011) and countries (Alkire et al., 2014). These understandings and methods have guided the formulation of public policies in poor areas to reduce poverty and prevent deprivation.

China is the largest developing country in the world and once had the largest rural poverty-stricken population (Liu et al., 2017, 2018), which has hampered its social and economic development. Poverty thus has attracted widespread attention from scholars in such disciplines as sociology, geography, economics and development studies. These studies mainly focus on the delimitation of poverty lines (Tong and Lin, 1994; Liu, 2003; Zhang and Zhang, 2010), types of poverty (Liu and Xu, 2016; Wang and Wang, 2016; Chen et al., 2017; Wang and Chen, 2017), regional differences of poverty (Yao et al., 2004; Ravallion and Chen, 2007a; Liu and Xu, 2016), the mechanism of poverty (Jalan and Rarallion, 2002; Fan and Chan-Kang, 2008; Glauben et al., 2012; Chen et al., 2016), antipoverty strategies (Rozelle et al., 1998; Park et al., 2002; Ravallion and Chen, 2007a; Ravallion, 2009; Glauben et al., 2012; Zhou et al., 2018a), multidimensional measurements of poverty and the mapping of poverty (Olivia et al., 2011; Qi and Wu, 2014; Yu, 2013; Liu and Xu, 2016; Wang and Chen, 2017), antipoverty effect of economic development (Rozelle et al., 1998; Yao, 2000; Meng et al., 2005; Zhang and Wan, 2006; Montalvo and Ravallion, 2010), and international comparisons (Luong and Unger, 1998; Ravallion, 2009, 2011).

Since the founding of the People's Republic of China (PRC) in 1949, the country has made great efforts to tackle the problems of poverty, and successfully explored Chinese methods of poverty alleviation and development (Du, 2012; Guo et al., 2018). These endeavours have greatly alleviated poverty in rural China. From 1978 to 2012, the cumulative number of people overcoming poverty in rural China exceeded 700.0 million (UN, 2015a; Liu et al., 2017; NBS, 2017), enabling China to become the first country in the world which successfully achieved the goal of halving the population living in extreme poverty (Guo et al., 2018; Zhou et al., 2018a). However, the long-standing urban-rural dualistic structure, together with the natural and social factors that restrict rural development (Liu et al., 2017; Guo et al., 2018), left a total of 43.4 million still living in poverty at the end of 2016 (NBS, 2017). Most of them lived in densely mountainous, highly arid, ecologically vulnerable, disaster-prone and habitat conservation areas, which were mainly old revolutionary bases or places where minorities clustered (Wang and Wang, 2015; Liu et al., 2017). In this context, the islanding effect of the distribution of the impoverished population and marginal diminishing effect of antipoverty resources pose great challenges to poverty alleviation and development in China (Liu et al., 2016; Liu and Cao, 2017), which cannot be effectively solved by existing strategies.

To overcome poverty and achieve the Well-off Society by 2020 as scheduled1, the Chinese government implemented targeted poverty alleviation (TPA) in 2013. As the main strategy for poverty alleviation in China currently and in the near future, TPA changes the targeting of antipoverty from regional and county levels to village and household scales (Wang et al., 2007; Li et al., 2015; Guo et al., 2018; Liu et al., 2018), introducing targeted measures that have greatly improve the power of antipoverty resources. However, the way how these measures work and their specific effects are little known. It is necessary to systematically analyse the TPA and explore the mechanisms underlying targeted antipoverty practices. This study investigates the connotations of TPA after reviewing the history of poverty alleviation in rural China and takes the old revolutionary base of Fuping, a poverty-stricken mountain county in Hebei province, as a case to investigate how poverty was alleviated via localization approaches under the framework of TPA. The findings of this study could provide valuable implications for the local planning and implementation of TPA in China, thereby contributing to global poverty alleviation and development.

Section snippets

Poverty alleviation in rural China

When the PRC was founded, the country was in a situation of universal poverty, and the central government adopted relief-type poverty alleviation to meet the needs of the poor (Guo et al., 2018; Liu et al., 2018). Subsequently, the practices of poverty alleviation in rural China can be summarized as structural reform-promoted poverty relief, development-oriented poverty relief drive, tackling key problems in poverty relief, as well as consolidation-oriented comprehensive poverty alleviation and

Connotation of targeted poverty alleviation

After nearly 40 years of economic reform and opening-up, development in China enters a period of transition (Long et al., 2010; Long and Liu, 2016; Liu and Li, 2017). The traditional modes of poverty alleviation and development cannot wholly eradicate poverty because of the islanding effect of the distribution of the poor and the marginal diminishing effect of antipoverty resources. Hence, TPA is proposed and the central government formulates a detailed top-level design to promote policy

Data sources

The data used in this study are both national level and county level, that of Fuping in Hebei Province. The former includes information about the impoverished population and socioeconomic development of China, which are derived from the China Statistical Yearbook (2017) and the Yearbook of China's Poverty Alleviation and Development (2015). While the data of Fuping are obtained from the people's government of Fuping County.

Study area

Fuping, a county in Hebei Province, is located in the south of the

Main measures of targeted poverty alleviation in Fuping

Under the guidance of TPA, poverty alleviation in Fuping was combined with county economic development by the government to stimulate the vitality of society and economy. Overall, the targeted measures mainly involved industrial development, resettlement assistance, financial development, education security, health safeguard and land consolidation. As a result of these efforts, the poverty in Fuping has been greatly alleviated, and the goal of poverty elimination will be achieved as scheduled.

Discussion

Since the reform and opening-up, poverty in China has been greatly alleviated due to the development-oriented policies (Yang and Wu, 2016; Liu et al., 2017), and has transformed from absolute to relative, universal to local and persistent to transient (Jalan and Ravallion, 1998; Ravallion and Chen, 2007a). Developed regions get rid of poverty quickly, while remote regions still have a large number of people living in poverty (Liu et al., 2016). In this context, the islanding and marginal

Conclusions

Poverty is an inevitable phenomenon of imbalanced regional development (Fan, 1995). To achieve sustainable development, eradicating poverty in all forms is a formidable task faced by developing countries worldwide. After nearly seventy years of poverty alleviation and development, China is currently at the decisive stage of antipoverty (Wang and Guo, 2015; Liu et al., 2017). In this study, we reviewed the history of poverty alleviation in rural China, discussed the connotation of TPA, and

Acknowledgments

This study was supported by the National Key Research and Development Program of China (Grant 2017YFC0504700), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grants 41601172, 41871183), the Certificate of China Postdoctoral Science Foundation Grant (Grant No. 2016M591105), and the Global Rural Project-China Rural Revitalization.

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