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Power and Poverty in China: Why Some Counties Perform Better in Poverty Alleviation?

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Abstract

Eliminating poverty is a worldwide problem, but China has recently made major achievements in poverty alleviation. By the end of 2020, 832 nationally designated poor counties had all been lifted out of poverty within five years. Why do some poor counties perform better in poverty alleviation? This paper leverages a unique county-level dataset of 832 nationally designated poor counties in China and uses discrete-time event history analysis to understand the relationship between political institutions and poverty alleviation. We find that the presence of a county party committee secretary concurrently holding a higher rank position above the county level significantly increases the odds ratio of accomplishing poverty alleviation tasks. Previous studies have emphasized the important role of empowering people in democracies for poverty reduction. This study shows that empowering key governmental actors in authoritarian regimes can help them increase their bargaining power and improve the performance of poverty alleviation. In addition, this paper echoes the research on political institutions of authoritarian systems and deepens the understanding of the importance of the higher-ranking institution of Chinese officials.

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Notes

  1. Park et al. (2002) gave a detailed discussion on the adjustment process for the first list of NDPCs.

  2. The meaning of "8–7 " was that China tried to basically solve the poverty problem of food and clothing for the 80 million poor people in rural areas in about seven years (from 1994 to 2000).

  3. On June 13, 2001, the State Council issued the "Outline of China's Rural Poverty Alleviation and Development (2001–2010)", which made a second adjustment and rebalanced the indicators for NDPCs. The NDPC designation for 33 poor counties in the east had all been removed and assigned to 33 counties in the central and western regions; thus, the east no longer had any NDPCs. At the same time, as a special area, all the counties in Tibet had been targeted as NDPCs. After this, there were a total of 592 NDPCs across the country. In 2011, the Central Committee of the CCP and the State Council issued the "Outline for Poverty Alleviation and Development in China's Rural Areas (2011–2020)", which made the third adjustment to the list of NDPCs. A total of 38 were transferred from the original nationally designated poor counties and 38 were transferred from the original non-nationally designated poor counties. The total number of NDPCs nationwide remains unchanged.

  4. Data source: the list of nationally designated poor counties published by Poverty Alleviation Development Office. Website: http://www.cpad.gov.cn/art/2014/12/23/art_343_981.html (access date is October 1, 2020).

  5. Data source: record of nationally designated poor counties out of poverty during 2016–2020: http://www.cpad.gov.cn/art/2020/10/16/art_343_1140.html (access date is October 18, 2020).

  6. Database of Chinese Party and Government Leading Cadres: http://cpc.people.com.cn/gbzl/index.html

  7. The potential for a multicollinearity problem is low. We test all of the variance inflation factors (VIFs) of the main independent variables in the logit model and determine that all of the VIFs are between 1.02 and 2.10.

  8. There were a few leaders who were promoted without leaving his position during the campaign; the proportion of these promoted county leaders in the remaining NDPCs is 4.33%, 12.06%, 4.86%, 7.32% and 5.77% respectively in the five years.

  9. The results are incorporated in the appendix. Table 6 reports the cases from 2016–2019 and Table 7 includes the time controls additionally. We thank the reviewer for pointing this potential threat.

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Acknowledgements

We have benefited from comments provided by Changdong Zhang, Xiao Ma, Ningchuan Zhang, Rundong Ji, and Hao Xi. All errors are our own.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Public Administration, Party School of the Central Committee of C.P.C (National Academy of Governance), Beijing, 10091, China

    Mengyao Li & Zemin Wu

  2. School of Government, Peking University, Beijing, 100871, China

    Mengyao Li & Zemin Wu

Authors
  1. Mengyao Li
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  2. Zemin Wu
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Zemin Wu.

Appendix

Appendix

Tables 6, 7, 8

Table 6 Descriptive statistics
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Table 7 Discrete logistic event history analysis(time period:2016–2019)
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Table 8 Discrete logistic event history analysis(time period:2016–2019 with time controls)
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Li, M., Wu, Z. Power and Poverty in China: Why Some Counties Perform Better in Poverty Alleviation?. J OF CHIN POLIT SCI 27, 319–340 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11366-021-09765-0

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