China’s poverty reduction has eliminated mass destitution, but uneven development, ageing and market pressures are shaping a more complex and ongoing challenge.
When we talk about poverty in China, what tends to be most visible is not structure but faces. A recent Financial Times report offered some facial portraits: an elderly woman surviving on homegrown vegetables in the mountains, a relocated family whose new apartment brought no income, and a small business owner wiped out by a flood. Such details carry more force than any macroeconomic chart. People are moved by particular stories rather than engage with an abstract national narrative.
Many outside observers read this kind of evidence as debunking government propaganda. If the government claims to have eradicated poverty, why can I still see it? The question touches a vulnerable point: the permanent gap between macro success and what individuals feel on the ground. But it rests on a premise that never existed. It assumes that the state has promised unconditional livelihood security for every citizen until they reach middle-class safety. By that measure, every elderly penny-watcher and every struggling family becomes a broken promise.
The core of China’s poverty alleviation was never a basic guarantee for every individual in difficulty. It was baseline governance, eliminating absolute poverty and preventing large-scale regression. This promise sounds less romantic because it does not provide a smooth passage into prosperity. But it relates to the places where state capacity has been most intensively deployed, preventing mass destitution that could have collapsed the entire social bottom line.
The mountain dweller still living with hardship, the resettlement family depending on remittances, these are true instances that deserve attention. But they do not mean that the poverty reduction gains are fictitious. They mean that China has moved from eliminating absolute poverty to a more difficult phase of consolidating gains, managing vulnerability, and addressing persistent unevenness.
The first phase asked whether people had enough to eat, roofs over their heads, roads, and schools. The second asks whether incomes are stable, whether industries can absorb people, and whether market volatility or aging might disrupt progress. Using the second set of problems to deny the completion of the first misses the point.
The difficult thing to grasp about China may not be why there is still poverty. It is why, at one and the same time, it presents the faces of several historical eras. China is not a society living in a single moment. It is a composite where pre-modern, modern, and post-modern conditions are layered together.
‘Pre-modern’ means geographic barriers still matter, family networks are still a safety net, and elderly people survive through smallholdings and remittances. ‘Modern’ means the state has a formidable capacity to build roads, relocate populations, and draw communities into formal governance. ‘Post-modern’ is already everyday life in core cities, platform labour, AI anxiety, demands for dignity and self-realisation.
These modes are not replacing one another. They coexist. You can see world-class high-speed rail while mountain dwellers still depend on thrift. China has compressed 200 years of development into 40, but the texture of social life rarely keeps pace with economic growth.
External assessments often make a methodological error. They assume China is already a homogeneous, mature society and project onto it the poverty lines and welfare expectations of high-income countries. Poverty lines are not purely technical. They are determined by the developmental stage. Demanding that the most remote, rugged areas reach the living standards of the eastern seaboard within four decades ignores the fact that no large country has ever managed such a transformation.
A current example illuminates this layering. Female tea pickers working for roughly 10 yuan an hour in some parts of China are condemned by foreign observers as underpaid. That condemnation is not wrong, but it hides a deeper story. Oversupply of tea leaf in the market and mechanisation have relegated manual picking to marginal land where leaf prices are low. Many of the women pickers are older, with low education and additional household care obligations. Picking tea is not just about money. It is one of the rare chances for women to step outside domestic labour, to gain some measure of agency, and to find mutual support. The 10 yuan wage is determined by market dynamics, geographic constraints, gender, and an aging rural population. As mechanisation advances, even these job opportunities may vanish. What will remain is the local community, and the question of what it will rely on for survival and dignity.
In this sense, external reporting is not wrong, simply incomplete. Weak regional infrastructure and resources and insufficient job creation for relocated people are real problems. But they are less like a fraudulent narrative and more like unfinished homework exposed as China enters its next phase. After eliminating absolute poverty at unprecedented scale, the harder challenge for the government is to bring those left behind by the market into stable systems of welfare and care. This is why ‘investing in people’ has become prominent in policy language. What China excelled at in the past was investing in things – roads, buildings and industrial parks. Now evidence proves that pulling people out of destitution is not enough. Healthcare, elderly care, education, childcare, and caregiving support impact directly on people and will be the line of defence against relapse.
The most important question may not be whether China has really eliminated poverty. It is this: having completed the largest elimination of absolute poverty in human history, how can it hold together a vast society where pre-modern, modern, and post-modern populations co-exist, and how does it solve the deep problem of social reproduction?
A country that intensely compressed modernisation has pushed back mass destitution on a world-historical scale. Precisely because it has moved so fast, it now confronts, earlier and more acutely, problems that would otherwise have surfaced more gradually.
Fred Gao
CGTN reporter in Beijing and worked for Guancha Net in Shanghai. My view doesn’t represent the CGTN standpoint. Feel free to contact me by email: gaoyingshi@gmail.com