Editor's note: Li Lun, a special commentator on current affairs for CGTN, is an assistant professor in the School of Economics at Peking University. The article reflects the author's opinions, and not necessarily those of CGTN.

When 34-year-old Chen Yonghui moved from a mountainous village in southwest China's Guizhou Province to a resettlement community in nearby Qinglong Town, the change was not only about housing.

In her old village, income opportunities were limited by geographical obstacles – poor roads, distant markets, and few non-farm jobs. After relocation, local authorities offered her vocational training, rent-free workshop space, preferential loans and equipment subsidies. Chen later opened a small traditional clothing workshop and earned 50,000 to 60,000 yuan (roughly $7,315 to $8,782) a year. "There are more opportunities to make money in urban areas than in rural areas," she said.

Chen's story is instructive because it shows what can be overlooked when poverty is discussed solely as an income category. The change in her life came not from a one-off financial transfer, but through access to training, credit, workspace and a more vibrant local economy.

This point matters when assessing China's anti-poverty campaign. Poverty, especially in remote rural regions, is rarely just a question of whether a household sits slightly above or below a specific number. It is also about whether children can access better schools, patients can receive timely healthcare, young workers can find jobs beyond subsistence farming, and families are sufficiently connected to the wider economy networks to plan for a different future.

And this is where the debate over China's poverty record can easily become misleading. A recent Financial Times article, entitled "China said it ended poverty. Did it?", asked whether China really ended poverty. It noted that although China declared in 2021 that it had eliminated extreme poverty, more than one-fifth of its population in 2022 still lived below the World Bank's poverty threshold for upper-middle-income countries – $8.30 per person per day, measured in 2021 purchasing power parity.

But that benchmark should not be used to suggest that China's earlier achievement was illusory. According to the World Bank's estimate, in 1990, roughly 99% of China's population lived below the same $8.30-a-day threshold; by 2022, that share had fallen to just over one-fifth. The same line that once covered almost the entire country now describes a much narrower population.

In fact, China is being held to a higher standard today precisely because hundreds of millions of people have moved far beyond the conditions that once defined absolute poverty. Treating this higher standard as a refutation of earlier progress conflates the next stage of development with a failure of the previous one.

A similar misunderstanding appears in the article's discussions of relocation and population loss in poor counties.

If a village loses population after roads, housing, and infrastructure have been built, one might conclude that the investment has failed. Yet this view is too static. The purpose of poverty alleviation is not to keep people in the places where poverty originally trapped them. In many remote areas, improved roads, new housing, schools, digital connectivity, and public services are valuable precisely because they enable people to move to nearby towns, provincial capitals, or coastal labor markets. A young worker leaving a poor mountain village for a better-paid job is not necessarily evidence of abandonment, but rather of the village finally being connected to a broader labor market.

Of course, relocation brings its own challenges. New apartment buildings don't automatically generate jobs. Some relocated residents may lack the skills required by nearby employers. Elderly residents may find it difficult to adapt. In some cases, communities may depend heavily on migrant remittances rather than stable local employment.

These are real problems that deserve serious policy attention. But they are better seen as the agenda after poverty alleviation, not as proof that poverty alleviation itself was meaningless in the first place.

Baiyanglin sub-district in Bijie city, Guizhou Province, offers a more useful way to think about this transition. As the largest single relocation site for poverty alleviation, it has brought together nearly 30,000 residents who previously lived in scattered mountainous villages. Reports have noted new schools, kindergartens, clinics, training programs, and local employment opportunities.

But the significance of such a community does not lie solely in the number of jobs it creates. Its deeper meaning is that relocation alters the constraints faced by poor households. Residents gain access to education, healthcare, and labor market information, while still confronting difficult tasks such as adapting to apartment living, acquiring marketable skills, and securing stable employment.

This is why relocation should not be judged solely by whether every household immediately reaches a comfortable income level. Rather, it should be assessed by whether it creates a platform from which families can move, work, study, and plan their lives in new ways.

This is why discussions of China's poverty reduction should not end at the poverty line. A poverty line can tell us who remains vulnerable, enable governments and researchers to measure deprivation, allocate resources, and track progress over time and across regions. But it cannot fully capture the evolution of the conditions facing poor households.

Through China's anti-poverty campaign, millions of households once constrained by geography, weak infrastructure, and limited public services have gained not only higher incomes but also improved connectivity to schools, markets, transport, health care, and employment opportunities. This expansion of possibilities is what China's anti-poverty campaign really changed – and it is precisely why its significance goes beyond the poverty line.

(If you want to contribute and have specific expertise, please contact us at opinions@cgtn.com. Follow @thouse_opinions on X, formerly Twitter, to discover the latest commentaries in the CGTN Opinion Section.)