Editor's note: The article is part of  CGTN's series called "A New Vision for China's Economic Future," in which global economists and eminent academics share their personal views and insights on China's economic development. Robert Walker is a professor of the School of Sociology at Beijing Normal University. He is also a professor emeritus and emeritus fellow of Green Templeton College at University of Oxford. The article reflects the author's opinions and not necessarily the views of CGTN.

Only China has determinedly sought to eradicate poverty rather than merely reduce it. This is despite member states of the United Nations (UN) agreeing to eliminate extreme absolute poverty globally. The fact that China has already succeeded in this goal is, therefore, an achievement of historic proportions.

It also demonstrates to the world the feasibility of eliminating poverty, something all nations are required to do by 2030 in accordance with the UN Sustainable Development Goals. However, China's success in eradicating rural absolute poverty is now a fact of history. China's new goal, common prosperity, is even more ambitious.

Tackling poverty has been a policy objective ever since the foundation of the People's Republic of China. With China's opening to world trade and the creation of a socialist market economy, a national structure for tackling poverty was established in 1986 under the auspices of the State Council. Its administrative organization reached down to the county level.  

Two strategies, the latter unique to China, were established in this very early period: area-based targeting and mobilizing social groups to assist or complement government agencies. Initially, 271 counties were identified and allowed to apply for poverty alleviation grants and subsidized loans, while mass organizations, including the Communist Youth League and the Women's Federation, were encouraged to design interventions such as improved village schooling.

The goal of eradicating poverty by 2020 was established in 2011. At the same time, the poverty line was deliberately raised to coincide more closely with the World Bank's standard for low-income countries. This inevitably also increased the number of people counted as poor and made the task of eradicating poverty even more challenging. It should be noted, however, that in 2010 China had become an upper-middle-income country reflecting its success in achieving rapid and sustained economic growth.

Chinese President Xi Jinping reaffirmed China's commitment to eliminate poverty at the Global Poverty Reduction and Development Forum in Beijing, October 16, 2015. Thereafter, poverty eradication became a flagship poverty, the target being to reduce poverty from over 56 million in 2015 to zero in 2020.

The area-based targeting strategy was retained – villages having largely replaced counties as the principal targeting unit in 2001 – but accompanied, as a world first, by individual level, precision targeting. While area-based targeting is administratively simple, drawing lines on a map, most people in poverty live outside targeted areas. Between 2014 and 2016, a database was constructed listing all persons living in poverty in rural areas. It reputedly took two million public officials to compile the list – a phenomenal administrative exercise but one that became the motor of poverty eradication, providing a means of measuring policy success and assessing staff performance.

Once identified, 775,000 officials were assigned responsibility for lifting named families out of poverty in addition to their daily duties. In some areas, Sundays – when officials often visited their assigned villagers – were called "Xi days." In addition, 188,000 officials from the Communist Party of China were sent to build grassroots support and to assist administrative officials in their work with village cadres.

The earlier principle of mobilization was also taken to scale. Each central government ministry had, from 1994, been required to care for a designated county, with bureau-ranked agencies at lower levels of government being similarly assigned a township or village. Similarly, an East-West framework had provided for pairing cities and provinces in China's more developed coastal area with 15 poor western regions and provinces. After 2015, as many as 267 developed cities and counties in the east were supporting some 400 poor counties in the west; state-owned enterprises were engaged in poverty-relief programmes covering 10,000 villages; and 22,000 private enterprises assisting 10,000 rural enterprises in as many villages.

But while important, precision targeting was only successful because it was embedded in a macroeconomic policy that delivered sustained economic growth accompanied by an integrated administrative system that could deliver the benefits of growth to every corner of China. Economic development – born from, and then funding, infrastructure investment – was driven from the center and complemented at the provincial level by detailed planning and human capital investment. Services, social assistance and latterly support for e-commerce were added at the township level while villages identified entrepreneurialism and were able to respond to individual needs.

Despite coordinated policies at all levels of government, the challenges confronted by poverty alleviation officials were often extreme. Even where development is powered by government intent rather than by the search for profit, some locations and environments cannot support above-poverty-level incomes. In Nujiang Lisu Autonomous Prefecture in mountainous Yunnan Province, for example, 102,000 people – 38 percent of those lifted out of poverty – moved into new residential accommodation in 69 resettlement sites and needed to acquire urban ways of living and new employment skills.

A clear target and firm leadership from the top ensured that the seemingly impossible goal of eradicating poverty became possible. However, as the Chinese economy continues to mature the rate of economic growth is unlikely to be sustained. Moreover, the new goal of common prosperity to be realised by 2050, with profound progress to be witnessed by 2035, cannot be achieved primarily by economic growth. Past growth has created an income distribution shaped like a pyramid with many people on low incomes and very few on high ones. President Xi has likened common prosperity to transforming the income distribution from a pyramid into an olive shape by ensuring that the benefits of future economic growth are shared more fairly than hitherto.

Common prosperity means that the balance of strategic investment needs to be refocused on human capital development, upskilling the workforce to accommodate a greener, technological and post-industrial economy that obviates the need for a large informal economy dependent on low wages. Even today, around 340 million Chinese have incomes below what the World Bank sets as a minimum for upper-middle-income countries. Social policy must therefore be strengthened to allow everyone the security currently only enjoyed by the rich, a strategy that President Xi explained in his keynote speech on social security before the Political Bureau of the Central Committee in 2021. Most people in the largest resettlement site in Nujiang are not yet economically self-sufficient.

While developing countries can take heart from China's success, few are likely to be able to repeat it. China's system of government, unlike many others, fosters common goals, cooperation and collaboration and is underpinned by an efficient administrative system. Moreover, the root cause of poverty is a global financial structure that favours rich countries and exploits developing ones, resulting in an excessive concentration of wealth in the Global North.

As the formulation of the Sustainable Development Goals makes clear, but rich countries resist, poverty can only be resolved through international cooperation and reform of global institutions. China's Global Development Initiative, to promote collaboration between developing countries, offers one positive model for the future. China's aspiration for a shared future for all mankind, a concept now adopted by the UN General Assembly First Commission and the Human Rights Council, is premised on common prosperity. If pursued, it could lift all from poverty to enjoy a better life.