China has made a remarkable achievement in poverty reduction in the past four decades. About 727 million, or 93% of its poor population in rural China has been lifted out of poverty since 1978. However, according to the 2011 official poverty line for rural residents and Di Bao for urban residents, there are still a total of 58 million of Chinese population under the poverty, including 43 million in rural areas and 15 million in urban areas by end of 2016. In November 29, 2015, an ambitious plan was made by the central government of China to lift all the remained poor in rural areas out of poverty by year 2020 in reference to the current poverty line. In order to reach this target, more resources, including funds, personnel, social and political ones, are and will be needed to be mobilized for the fight against poverty.

The Report on the Work of the Government delivered in the Fourth Session of 12th National People’s Congress emphasized that over 10 million poor populations should move out of poverty and the national fiscal investment on poverty reduction will increase by 43.4% in 2016. In November 23, 2016, the 13th Five Year Plan on Poverty Alleviation was issued which provided guideline for poverty alleviation in the next five years. Poverty alleviation through industrial development, transferring employment opportunities, immigrant relocation, education, health service, environmental protection and social participation are the major approaches identified. Among these, poverty alleviation through industrial development which aims at improving rural labors’ opportunities and increasing the income is a fundamental approach to move around 50% of the rural poor out of poverty. The approach is often referred as “Bottom of Pyramid” (BoP). BoP targets at the group whose annual income is lower than 3000 USD and advocates market-oriented agriculture development with plan for planting, livestock, aquaculture, forestry sector and the integrative development among agriculture, manufactory and service. BoP also supports farmer cooperatives, enterprises, and households to be involved in production, storage, processing, and marketing through contract farming and other value chain services. Gender capacity building programs and financial support programs to producers especially women farmers also enable BoP pro-poor and sustainable way for agriculture and rural development. Besides the practices in agriculture, there’re also examples of BoP in rural livelihoods including energy, housing, transportation, communications, medical care, financing, etc. Along with the social and economic transformation and value chain development, there’s rising demand for more dynamic BoP models.

The Chinese Government encourages the social multi-stakeholders (including the government agencies, state-owned enterprises, private sector, social and civil organizations and individuals) participation through pair-wise aid approach and international cooperation. The World Bank, ADB, UNDP, WFP, FAO, IFPRI and many other international organizations joint this effort for China’s poverty reduction and towards achieving the UN SDGs. But there are a number of challenges faced by China’s fight against the poverty. Firstly, the national poverty profile is complicated with lack of urban poverty standards and different provincial poverty standards for rural poor with localized resources constraints and policy priorities. Second, there is a gap in public service and social safety nets between urban and rural areas, and the gap is somehow neglected as more focus is on the income growth. By 2020 when China achieves the goal to establish a moderately prosperous society, the poverty reduction strategy should have coordinated the rural and urban area and paid more attention on the social protection system and public service system. Third, there’s room to increase the efficiency of poverty reduction policies considering the involvement of multi departments in policy making and intervention. Fourth, there’s urgent need for identifying successful BoP approaches and cases for scaling up and the coordination of up-bottom policy making and the bottom-up participatory approach with consideration of poverty population’s needs. Fifth, the government plays crucial role in poverty alleviation while the social participation especially the private sectors’ role is comparably weak. Sixth, as China is investing more in international aid to other developing countries, the concern arises to balance the investment for domestic and international poverty alleviation.

To fight against the poverty effectively, the policy makers, researchers and practitioners need to have a clear picture of the above challenges and take proactive measures. The proposed project has the following objectives:

1) Analyzing the current status and changing nature of poverty in China, including rural and urban poor with different provincial poverty standards and imbalanced geographic distribution during the period of rising urbanization;

2) Identifying the challenges for poverty reduction in China, profiling the existing policy measures to address the challenges, and identifying the gaps that still exists for improving poverty population’s welfare and the coordination of multi departments;

3) Providing a clear picture of the poverty reduction through industrial development, the BoP approaches and policies in China; and identifying successful models and cases, with specific focus on drawing implications for the Japanese enterprises;

4) Analyzing China’s principles, key areas, challenges, and approaches in international aid for poverty alleviation;

5) Providing recommendations on how JICA can support implementation of China’s poverty alleviation strategy.  

Achieving the above objectives will provide a good base for JICA to identify the key areas of intervention in poverty reduction. The BoP mapping will facilitate private sector including Japanese enterprises for its effective participation in the poverty reduction and industry development. China’s practices in balancing the efforts on reducing both domestic and international poverty and promoting the good practices to other countries will be useful for JICA’s program design in China and internationally.