To improve lives, the details count

China's targeted anti-poverty strategy can help policymakers elsewhere, World Bank official says

Editor's note: As China aims to eliminate extreme poverty and be a "moderately prosperous society" (xiaokang shehui) in time for the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party of China next year, we talk to experts for their take on the country's commitment.

China's reform and opening-up and its targeted interventions in reducing poverty are among the lessons that can be learned and disseminated among developing countries, which would also benefit from Beijing's new growth pattern that centers on an increased domestic market, the World Bank's China chief, Martin Raiser, says.

"Many lessons can be learned from China's sustained gains in poverty-reduction over the past 40 years," said Raiser, country director for China and Mongolia for the bank, a 189-member lender that gives priority to ending extreme poverty and promoting common prosperity.

Among the high-level lessons, Raiser highlighted the country's starting of its reform and opening-up four decades ago, which enabled it to reap "huge gains" in efficiency that drove an increase in incomes for all Chinese.

"The second lesson is that while reforms and allowing market forces to play a growing role in the economy were a big part of China's success, more targeted interventions became necessary, focusing in particular on the concentration of poverty in rural areas," Raiser said.

Raiser joined the World Bank in 2003 and was posted to Beijing in March last year. He was well aware of how China's massive poverty-relief drive had proceeded before his posting.

One of the "big things" that happened in the early 2000s was that China started building up a database of up to 150,000 villages, determined to be poverty-stricken places, and then policy was directed to help those particular areas, he said.

"Over time it became increasingly clear that poverty is no longer a place-related affliction, but it has a lot to do with personal household characteristics, and so from monitoring places you have to move to monitoring households," he told China Central Television on Oct 27.

"I think China clearly demonstrates that economic growth, and in particular the kind of economic growth that China was able to generate, is the key contributor to poverty-reduction in the first three decades."

Then over the past decade and particularly after 2013, the targeted social policies covered "the last mile" of the poverty-alleviation course, he said.