British scholar: China's poverty alleviation should be viewed in a broader context

Added: 2026-05-31

[00:00:05]So, I don't think they believe, and therefore they don't look to find positively. You can always find an example and partially tell the story. And then there's the language of poverty. Nobody opposes the eradication of poverty, but you can never truly eradicate poverty because poverty changes.

[00:00:30]We have one definition of poverty, absolute, which is about whether I have enough resources to live from today until tomorrow.

[00:00:40]You can eradicate that poverty. China eradicated a version of that poverty in rural China, and that's what we're celebrating 5 years on. And it's true, it was a real achievement. But when countries develop, they realize that their people want more than survival from one day to the next. They want some sort of a good life. We now talk about common prosperity or shared prosperity, this vision of the future. So, within that vision, when we move to 2035, when we've made good progress, and to 2050, when we've achieved it, will everybody have the same income?

[00:01:24]I don't think that's part of Xi Jinping's vision and the party's vision of what common prosperity is. But it is a vision about there going to be some form of bottom to that distribution for which people will no longer fall.

[00:01:40]And we can call that the tail end of inequality, or we can call that some form of exclusion.

[00:01:52]You know, I've argued all time that poverty is a process, it's dynamic. It's experienced dynamically. I wasn't poor last week, I am now, I won't be next.

[00:02:01]It's the same in a in a in a in a global sense.

[00:02:05]China has developed enormously since opening up. You know, that journey is a is an incredible journey. China has moved to become a country which is an upper middle country, knocking on the door of becoming a high-income country.

[00:02:20]So, going back to your Financial Times, the journalist picked up the World Bank's definition for upper middle-income countries, which I think is $8.30 a day, and said, "China is not addressing that."

[00:02:33]And what I was able to show was that China did address that, although it didn't do so explicitly. It never mentioned that it was doing that, but it focused on sustainable growth. And as economic growth rose, so living standards rose.

[00:02:49]So, every wherever you pinch that threshold, people will be lifted above it, which is what China was doing. But, if you if you focus on what China has measured and eradicated, then yes, poverty is too low for the China of today. China recognizes that, but perhaps the story that it wants to tell could be more nuanced than the story that it actually tells.

[00:03:21]The The key test is to keep going.

[00:03:24]As I So, the the eradication of poverty was like the ending of of exclusion.

[00:03:31]This transitional phase is moving from exclusion to inclusion. As we move forward to common prosperity, the poor, as different from us, are now part of us. They are sharing the same services and and and have the same opportunities, but also the same responsibilities as us. So, we are developing social security systems support them. There's no longer a case to be poor.

[00:03:58]There's risks of being poor. We have to address those risks and we have to address those socially as well as individually. And that's that's in the sense the journey that we're moving on.

[00:04:08]So, China has to keep going and China is unique in able to be keep going. China's five-year plans, if you look back at them, that are fascinating this long trajectory. As we as we develop and move forward, it is able to do that in a way that many democracies can't.