China Makes Historic Achievements in Poverty Reduction

Benedict Bingham, former ADB Country Director for the People’s Republic of China, acclaimed the progress China has made in reducing poverty over the past 40 years.“Because of the size of China and because of the size of the reduction, China has made a major contribution to global millennium goal targets. So it’s a historic achievement,”he said.

 H.E. Benedict Bingham, former Country Director for the People’s Republic of China, Asian Development Bank

Mr. Bingham analyzed the poverty reduction trajectory in China over the four decades. In his opinion, the first part is roughly from the opening-up to the end of the 1990s, when there was heavy investment in infrastructure, and basic policy making including macro stability to allow this highly densely-populated country to move up its potential or move up closer to its economic potential. That part of it wasn’t easy, but relatively straightforward, he said.

Once China has got beyond the macro phase of poverty reduction, the issue becomes much more localized and much more experimental.“The project we were doing in Shanxi in 2009 on agricultural development and poverty reduction is highly specific because you have to target policy initiatives and tailor them to the individual circumstances of those communities,”said Bingham.

He suggests that 2020 is going to be another milestone for poverty alleviation because China is on track to achieve its objective, its goal of eliminating absolute poverty according to the national standards by 2020.“So if you look at where we are now, and where we expect to be in a couple of years’time, it’s clearly a historic achievement,”he said.

He believes that the sheer magnitude of people that have been lifted out of poverty has clearly been a major contribution to the millennium development goals, now the sustainable development goals.“It would be probably fair to say that if I took China out of the picture, the global progress would look very different,”he added.

Bingham also pointed out that once China reaches the 2020 landmark, the nature of discussion on poverty reduction in China will change from absolute to relative poverty. In a new era, the wellbeing of the people is the key.

In recent years, knowledge sharing has become a new highlight in poverty reduction. From the building of the Global Poverty Reduction Online Knowledge Sharing Database to the launch of the Global Solicitation and Challenge Prize on Best Practices campaign, all the efforts have vitalized the cause of poverty reduction. In Bingham’s view, knowledge sharing in the field of poverty reduction can be described as tremendously important.

He thinks that without arrangement, what was left was just scattered and inaccessible knowledge, but after harvesting and distilling, China created a body of knowledge that enables people to look at the policy reforms or initiatives that China put on the ground, study them, take that knowledge, transplant it into their own societies, and then make their own decisions.

“This is in essence what China has done right through development, which is to go and look at other countries, harvest their knowledge, think about how bits and pieces of that knowledge could be relevant in China and then figure out the unique combinations of that knowledge to apply to these circumstances,”said Bingham.

He believes that the Global Solicitation and Challenge Prize on Best Practices campaign could incentivize people to go through the arduous process of actually examining what they’ve done, thinking about what they’ve done and packaging what they’ve done in a way that can easily be communicated to others.“These case studies will all be part of this rich fabric of learning and shared learning that will be important to the government agenda, not just in China but outside of China as well,”he suggested.

The Global Solicitation and Challenge Prize on Best Practices campaign, launched at the 2018 China Poverty Reduction International Forum, is the first of its kind in the field of international poverty reduction and the latest attempt to innovate and deepen global poverty reduction partnerships. It has attracted many international organizations to participate. In addition, the best practices will be published on the Global Poverty Reduction Online Knowledge Sharing Database to stimulate global knowledge sharing and idea exchange on poverty reduction.