China’s Experience in Anti-Poverty: Industrial Development and Ecological Protection

Abstract

Since the 1980s, the Chinese government has been persistently taking poverty alleviation and development as the core mission of national development, and has made remarkable achievements in poverty reduction. In the early days of reform and opening up, China's poverty alleviation work was mainly centered on the traditional relief poverty alleviation. The government carried out a blood-transfusion mode of poverty alleviation in rural areas by means of financial appropriation and preferential security policies to make sure that the basic problems of food and clothing of the residents in those areas could be solved. However, along with the promotion of poverty alleviation and development, China's poor population began to share the features of geographical distribution, and the incidence of poverty in the underdeveloped central and western regions began to widen its gap gradually with other regions. Restricted by some factors in economy, culture and natural conditions, some traditional relief poverty alleviation measures are found to be inefficient in helping these areas shake off poverty from the root. In order to solve this problem, the Chinese government proposed the industrial poverty alleviation as a core method of development-oriented poverty reduction strategy, that is, to take a particular poor area as an object, to adjust measures to local conditions to develop speciality industry, to improve the production and living conditions of the poor areas, hence to enhance the local residents’ abilities to produce adequate food and clothing and their self-dependence, so as to realize the shift from transfusion-like to hematologists-like way of poverty alleviation.