China - From Poor Areas to Poor People : China’s Evolving Poverty Reduction Agenda - An Assessment of Poverty and Inequality in China

China's progress in poverty
reduction over the last 25 years is enviable. One cannot
fail to be impressed by what this vast nation of 1.3 billion
people has achieved in so little time. In terms of a wide
range of indicators, the progress has been remarkable.
Poverty in terms of income and consumption has been
dramatically reduced. Progress has also been substantial in
terms of human development indicators. Most of the
millennium development goals have either already been
achieved or the country is well on the way to achieving
them. As a result of this progress, the country is now at a
very different stage of development than it was at the dawn
of the economic reforms at the beginning of the 1980s.
China's poverty reduction performance has been even
more striking. Between 1981 and 2004, the fraction of the
population consuming below this poverty line fell from 65
percent to 10 percent, and the absolute number of poor fell
from 652 million to 135 million, a decline of over half a
billion people. The most rapid declines in poverty, in both
the poverty rate and the number of poor, occurred during the
6th, 8th, and 10th plans. During the 7th plan period the
number of poor actually rose, while in the 9th plan period,
the poverty rate declined only marginally. But the pace of
poverty reduction resumed between 2001 and 2004 and there
are indications that during the first couple of years of the
11th plan poverty has continued to decline rapidly. The most
recent official estimate of rural poverty in China for 2007
puts the number of poor at 14.79 million, or less than 2
percent of the rural population. While there is no official
urban poverty line, estimates by others have found poverty
levels in urban areas to be negligible using an urban
poverty line that is comparable to the official poverty line
for rural areas. These estimates thus suggest that only
about 1 percent of China's population is currently in
extreme poverty. Notwithstanding this tremendous success,
the central thesis of this report is that the task of
poverty reduction in many ways continues and in some
respects has become more demanding.