The code of targeted poverty alleviation in China: A geography perspective

Abstract

Geography is suitable for the study of sustainability from a transdisciplinary perspective, which takes the human-land relationship as the core research. As a key obstacle to rural sustainability, poverty is an external manifestation of the coupling maladjustment of elements in human-land territorial systems. As the world's largest developing country, China eradicated extreme poverty in 2020 and made significant contributions to global poverty reduction. Especially over the last eight years, China has implemented a targeted poverty alleviation (TPA) strategy and has continuously promoted theoretical, organizational and institutional innovations for poverty reduction. From the perspective of geography, this paper extracts the experiences of China's TPA strategy, represented by the "5W2H" mode. The research concludes that: (1) Precise identification, as the foundation of TPA, aims to introduce a registration system to obtain records of all poor households and then answer the "5W" (what, where, why, who, when) issues of the geography of poverty. (2) Precise assistance is the key of TPA, which aims to solve the issue of "how to offer help and support". The barriers to escaping poverty can be accomplished through policies and measures that focus on the diverse causes of poverty and considering different situations. (3) Accurate assessments are an essential means of TPA, relevant to solve "how to measure the end of poverty alleviation", and third-party evaluations play an important role in improving the accuracy of poverty alleviation. (4) The TPA mechanism lies in reconstructing the human-land-industry structures in the impoverished areal system. It is urgent to introduce China's successful experience and typical modes of TPA for global human-earth system coordination and sustainable development and contribute to building a community of human destiny.

Keywords

Targeted poverty alleviation / Sustainable development / China / Geography / Experience

Declaration of Competing Interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Acknowledgements

This research was funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 42071231, 41931293).

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