By Zhou Shaojie | CHINA DAILY | Thursday, February 28, 2019

The author is associate professor of Tsinghua University and research fellow of the Institute for Contemporary China Studies.

Over the past 40 years, since the start of the reform and opening-up, China's achievement in poverty eradication has been without parallel.

At the beginning of the period of reform and opening-up, China's poverty incidence was as high as 84 percent, with approximately 840 million people living below the absolute poverty line.

By 2015, China's poverty incidence had fallen to 0.7 percent.

China's Engel coefficient, a measure proposed by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, reached 29.3 percent in 2017, just inside the affluent range of less than 30 percent.

As a result, the overall living standard of nearly 1.4 billion Chinese people is now relatively high.

The direct causes and most valuable lessons of this achievement can be summarized into three main points.

First, since 1978, under the leadership of China's Communist Party, the country has persisted with a strategy centered on economic construction, steadily promoted reforms in various fields,continuously increased the country's level of opening-up, and gradually established a socialist market economy system in accordance with China's national conditions and development path, while actively generating economic opportunities for the nation's people.

During the period from 1978 to 2017, the per capita disposable income of China's population increased by as much as 24 times, while the incidence of poverty declined accordingly.

Separately, the level of urbanization rose from 17.9 percent in 1978 to 58.5 percent in 2017, and the urban population increased by 640 million, equivalent to twice the population of the United States. During the same period, the number of rural poor decreased by 740 million. Together, these developments have greatly reduced the incidence of rural poverty and helped China take the lead in ending absolute poverty among all developing countries.

Second, China's commitment to people-centered development, and the implementation of a people-oriented social development policy has greatly promoted the country's education and healthcare.

There has been a historic advance in the level of human development, from low level (1980-2000) to middle level (2000-10) and ultimately, to high level (after 2011).

In terms of progress in education, in 2017 a total of 7.61 million students were admitted into universities, compared to just 270,000 in 1977, when the national college entrance examination was reintroduced.

The gross enrollment rate of higher education increased from 3.4 percent in 1990 to 45.7 percent in 2017, exceeding the average of upper middle income countries.

The average number of years of education for the working-age population increased from less than 5 years in 1981 to 10.5 years in 2017.

With respect to development in health, life expectancy rose from 67.8 years in 1982 to 76.7 years in 2017, an increase of 10 years, while the major health indicators are better than the average level among middle and high income countries.

Over the past 40 years, the development of the social sector has not only provided support for economic growth with human capital, but has also become a crucial driving force for poverty reduction.

Third, China's ongoing implementation of its poverty reduction strategy is a classic relay race, involving the execution of various targeted policies in different development periods.

In 1980, the poverty alleviation fund was set up. And in 1986, the State Council Leading Group for Poverty Alleviation and Development was established.

Then, eight years later, in 1994, large-scale poverty alleviation and development efforts began in earnest. These included the "August 7 Poverty Alleviation Plan", which marked a shift from poverty alleviation for relief to poverty alleviation for development.

Also, in 2007, China's poverty alleviation strategy underwent a second major adjustment - from a regional poverty alleviation and development strategy to a combination of social security poverty alleviation and developmental poverty alleviation, with special priority given to poverty-stricken villages.

A third major adjustment, a change of emphasis from overall poverty alleviation to precisely targeted poverty alleviation and eradication, took place in 2013. By 2017, this new approach had reduced the number of rural poor in China by nearly 52 million. China's precise poverty reduction strategy has received acclaim from United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, who believes that "precise poverty reduction is the only way to help the poorest and achieve the ambitious goals of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development".

The three factors outlined above have brought about China's "poverty reduction miracle".Crucial to their implementation and success has been the leadership of the Communist Party of China, a fact that reflects the essential characteristic of socialism: that is, "poverty is not socialism".

China's experience thus exemplifies the advantage of the path of socialism with Chinese characteristics, while it also provides the strategy and wisdom needed for the UN to eliminate rural poverty.

On Dec 20, 2018, under the initiative of and with strong encouragement from China, the 73rd session of the UN General Assembly adopted the draft resolution Eradicating Rural Poverty to Implement the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development submitted by the Group of 77 and China. Under the terms of this resolution, the first ever to be adopted by the UN General Assembly on the elimination of rural poverty, a new policy framework will be established. And this will include infrastructure construction, inclusive finance, elimination of the digital divide, increased employment, promotion of quality education, strengthening of social security systems, boosting of international cooperation and the implementation of precise poverty alleviation.

At present, poverty remains the world's biggest development challenge, as there are still more than 700 million people living in extreme poverty globally.

China's experience in poverty reduction will inevitably have a positive impact on the push for poverty reduction, especially in developing countries.

And it can be expected that through its success in comprehensively building a well-off society and completely eradicating poverty by 2020, China will shift from the quantity poverty reduction phase to the quality phase, meaning, China will continue to improve the living standards of the low-income population and reinforce its poverty reduction achievement.