In China today, poverty refers mainly to the rural poor, as decades of economic growth has largely eradicated urban poverty.[1][2][3] The dramatic progress in reducing poverty over the past three decades in China is well known. According to the World Bank, more than 500 million people were lifted out of extreme poverty as China’s poverty rate fell from 88 percent in 1981 to 6.5 percent in 2012, as measured by the percentage of people living on the equivalent of US$1.90 or less per day in 2011 purchasing price parity terms.[4]
Since the start of far-reaching economic reforms in the late 1970s, growth has fueled a remarkable increase in per capita income helping to lift more people out of poverty than anywhere else in the world: its per capita income has increased fivefold between 1990 and 2000, from $200 to $1,000. Between 2000 and 2010, per capita income also rose by the same rate, from $1,000 to $5,000, moving China into the ranks of middle-income countries. Between 1990 and 2005, China’s progress accounted for more than three-quarters of global poverty reduction and a big factor in why the world reached the UN millennium development goal of halving extreme poverty. This incredible success was delivered by a combination of a rapidly expanding labour market, driven by a protracted period of economic growth, and a series of government transfers such as an urban subsidy, and the introduction of a rural pension.[5] Independent studies by Gallup indicate the poverty rate in China fell from 26% in 2007 to 7% by 2012,[6] although World Bank extrapolations suggest that the percentage of the population living below the international poverty line continued to fall to 4.1 percent in 2014.[4] As of 2018 the number of people in poverty living below the national poverty line is around 30 million, about 2% of the population.[7] With hopes of totally eradicating poverty by 2020.
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