On March 19, the State Council’s Leading Group Office of Poverty Alleviation and Development(LGOPAD), China’s task force for poverty alleviation, unveiled an updated list of national-level poverty-stricken counties on its official website, with 592 counties listed as being in severe destitution. These counties will be the central locations for the country’s poverty relief efforts.
　　Of the 592 counties, 217 are in the central region, and the rest are in the west of the country. More than 230 of these impoverished counties are located in provinces or regions inhabited by ethnic minorities.
　　Yunnan Province in southwest China topped the list with 73 impoverished counties. It is followed by southwest China’s Guizhou Province and northwest China’s Shaanxi Province, with each having 50 counties included in the list.
　　China started implementing its anti-poverty program in an organized and large-scale manner in 1986, designating 273 counties as national-level poverty-stricken counties.
　　In 1994, 592 counties in 27 provinces, municipalities and autonomous regions were listed as the key poverty-stricken counties to be aided at that time. The number of counties listed in the poverty reduction program has been capped at 592 since then.
　　Over the past two decades, the list has un- dergone three major adjustments, with more than half of the counties replaced. In 2001, the Central Government decided to exclude all counties in coastal areas from the list, leading to 33 such counties being dropped.
　　To be considered for the list, the counties are evaluated by factors such as the population living below the poverty line, per-capita net income and per-capita government revenue.
　　Zhuang Jian, a senior economist with the Asian Development Bank, said that the program has played quite a significant role in poverty alleviation in China by providing fiscal and technical support to poverty-stricken regions.
　　“In many listed counties, we have witnessed an improvement in the local infrastructure as well as people’s access to drinking water and electricity,” Zhuang said.
　　 A higher standard
　　 The update of the list of national-level poverty-stricken counties is also a response to the revision of the national poverty standard.
　　On November 29 last year, the Chinese Government raised the poverty threshold to 2,300-yuan ($365) annual net income of farmers, a 92-percent increase from the standard set in 2009 at 1,196 yuan ($190).
　　As per the new standard, an estimated 128 million rural residents were considered living in poverty at the end of 2011, accounting for 13.4 percent of the total rural population.
　　“The previous poverty line underestimated the number of poor people in rural China,” said Wang Sangui, a professor at the School of Agricultural Economics and Rural Development of the Beijing-based Renmin University of China. “Only 2.8 percent of the rural population was officially considered poor, which was lower than many developed countries such as the United States, which has a poverty rate of about 15 percent.”
　　Wang believes the new poverty standard better reflects the situation in China and will bring more resources to poverty-stricken regions.
　　The revision also means more people will be covered by the government’s poverty reduction funds. According to Fan Xiaojian, head of the LGOPAD of the State Council, the country plans to allocate more money for poverty reduction this year, amounting to a 20-percent increase from the 27.2 billion yuan($4.32 billion) allocated in 2011.
　　“The increased budget allocation will be used to target clustered poverty-stricken areas, which will be the new focus of poverty relief efforts,” Fan said.
　　Meanwhile, Zhuang with the Asian Development Bank said that a major bottleneck for such a large-scale program is its failure to tar- get the most needy segments of the population, despite its achievement in raising the general income of impoverished regions.
　　According to regulations, the special funds for poverty relief will be split into three parts, with 60 percent earmarked for developing industries and special agricultural items, 30 percent for infrastructure construction and 10 percent for the training of impoverished locals.
　　Some are worried, however, that the “easy money” may become a source of corruption in some regions.
　　Du Xiaoshan, a researcher at the Rural Development Institute of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS), echoed the sentiment, indicating that some of the funds are not appropriately allocated and used.
　　“Problems like fund appropriation and misuse are not uncommon, and can only be addressed with a transparent management mechanism,” Du said, stressing that the funds should be cautiously used to solve urgent problems.
　　Between 2004 and 2005, 56 officials in southwest China’s Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region were found to have embezzled 11 million yuan ($1.75 million) from poverty alleviation funds, according to a report by Xinhua News Agency.
　　“The government is striving to improve the management of funds earmarked for poverty relief projects in rural areas,” said Hu Jinglin, Assistant Minister of Finance, at a news conference last December. “There will be regular information disclosure about the projects and officials found guilty of embezzling or misusing the funds would be severely punished.”
　　According to Hu, the Central Government is also considering establishing a comprehensive evaluation mechanism to determine whether local governments have used the poverty alleviation funds in an effective and efficient way.
　　However, sufficient funds alone do not necessarily guarantee the success of the poverty alleviation program.
　　“At least three factors restrain the development of impoverished areas, including harsh natural conditions, a large povertystricken population and poor infrastructure,”said Zhang Yi, a researcher with the CASS Institute of Population and Labor Economics.
　　 New battlefields
　　On November 1, 2011, the Outline for Poverty Reduction and Development of China’s Rural Areas (2011-20) was released. The chief target is to provide adequate food and clothing for poverty-stricken people while ensuring their access to compulsory education, basic medical services and housing by 2020.
　　The outline is the third state-level povertyreduction plan since 1994 and is part of the government’s efforts to build a well-off society in an all-around way by 2020.
　　However, anti-poverty experts warn that some deep-seated problems are constraining the development of the country’s poor areas, and the whole project of poverty reduction will continue to be an arduous and long-term task for the government.
　　Some regions of the country remain poor, including the Liupanshan mountainous areas in Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region and the Qinling-Bashan mountainous regions in Shaanxi and Sichuan provinces, partly because of their unfavorable access to transportation, climate and geographic conditions.
　　The outline said the government will focus on helping poverty-stricken areas that lie in vast and contiguous stretches shake off poverty over the next decade.
　　“These regions will see intensified efforts aimed at fighting poverty and increased financial input from the government,” said Professor Wang at Renmin University of China.
　　As a follow up, a trans-provincial trial project for poverty relief was launched in November last year in China’s central and western regions.
　　The pilot scheme is based in the Wuling Mountain region that covers 71 underdeveloped counties in Hubei, Hunan and Guizhou provinces and Chongqing Municipality.
　　Apart from the Wuling Mountain project, the Central Government also pledged to set up 10 other trans-provincial poverty-reduction projects, located mainly in mountainous areas in central and western parts of China.
　　Meanwhile, three special regional projects are targeting regions with concentrated populations of ethnic minorities including Tibet Autonomous Region, Tibetan-populated areas in Sichuan, Yunnan, Gansu and Qinghai provinces and the southern part of Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region.
　　The 14 clustered poverty-stricken areas, which cover a total of 679 counties with a combined population of more than 236 million, will be the main battlefield for the country’s poverty alleviation work in the next decade, said Fan with the LGOPAD.
　　“The idea is both a continuation and an innovation to past working thoughts,” Fan said.
　　According to him, China’s poverty-stricken counties are mainly distributed in certain clustered areas, with common characteristics. In the 1980s, the government set up 18 areas as the main targets for special support, but with the change of project emphasis these areas were replaced by key poverty-stricken counties.
　　After more than two decades of development, there has been significant progress in poverty alleviation. “Although development has been achieved in many of the povertystricken counties recognized in the 1980s, a new challenge has appeared—imbalanced development,” Fan said.
　　Huang Chengwei, Deputy Director of the International Poverty Reduction Center in China under the LGOPAD, said that making clustered poverty-stricken areas the main battlefield is an inevitable choice for China’s poverty alleviation program in the next decade.
　　According to Huang, a veteran researcher of the poverty relief system for clustered areas, China’s absolute poor population is mainly centered in some clustered mountainous areas, which makes it feasible for the government to implement a highly focused poverty alleviation program.
　　“The past decade’s poverty reduction target has been completed on time. The next step will require more concentrated efforts,”Huang said.
　　Wu Guobao, Director of the Poverty and Development Finance Division at the Rural Development Institute of the CASS, said that the aim of setting up clustered povertystricken areas is not only to increase those poor residents’ incomes but also to solve the shortage of infrastructure facing these areas.
　　


　　 Task still arduous
　　“Poverty reduction does not only mean providing adequate food and clothing for those in need, it should help assistance recipients live with dignity,” said Li Xiaoyun, a rural development expert at Renmin University of China. “In the past, China faced the challenge of widespread absolute poverty. Right now, its main task is to deal with the yawning wealth gap between the rich and the poor.”
　　According to LGOPAD director Fan, the average per-capita income of China’s urban residents was 3.23 times that of rural residents in 2010.
　　“The widening wealth gaps between urban and rural areas, between different regions and between the rich and the poor in China have become a major public concern,” Fan said.
　　“China needs to pay more attention to comparative poverty, which is more serious than absolute poverty because it is a matter of social justice,” said Li Shi, a professor of economics at Beijing Normal University.“This requires a change in how we define and understand poverty.”
　　Meanwhile, some rural residents easily fall back into poverty when struck by natural disasters and economic changes.
　　“The difficulty in eliminating poverty, therefore, lies not only in reducing the poverty-stricken population, but also in boosting impoverished regions’ capabilities for selfinitiated development,” Wang said.
　　In recent years, there have been growing calls for focusing poverty alleviation efforts more on ways to increase opportunities and personal development for both poor people as well as income.
　　“To achieve this, the government should provide more services and opportunities for the poor, including better education, better healthcare, more job opportunities and broader social security coverage,” Li Shi said, suggesting the state poverty alleviation strategy should be integrated with national income distribution and redistribution policies.
　　According to Li Shi, there are also a great number of people living slightly above the poverty line, who do not receive any govern- ment help, although their conditions are not much better than those living below the poverty line.
　　“People living on the edge of the poverty line are at great risk of falling into poverty, because their opportunities and personal development options are the same as those living below the poverty line,” Li said. “Hence, the government should reform its poverty alleviation policy and expand its measures so that not only more people are lifted out of poverty, but also more people are prevented from falling into it.”
　　The government said in the 2011-20 anti-poverty outline that it will continue to improve its social security network and make social security a basic measure for solving the problems of insufficient food and clothing.
　　Established in 2007, China’s rural minimum living allowance system had covered 52.14 million poverty-stricken farmers by the end of 2010.
　　During this year’s annual sessions of the National People’s Congress (NPC) and the National Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, lawmakers and political advisors called for various additional efforts for poverty alleviation, including dedicated laws and coordinated efforts in different fields.
　　“A dedicated law for poverty alleviation and development will help shorten the time for the people in the less-developed areas to share the fruits of development,” said Lu Zhiming, a deputy to the NPC and Vice Governor of Guizhou Province. “We need to make studies and enact the poverty relief and development law, rather than staying in the policy level as before.”
　　Cao Lili, another NPC deputy and Director of the Civil Affairs Bureau of northwest China’s Shaanxi Province, said that there should be tailored approaches for different people and regions, so that anti-poverty efforts will be more practical.