Joint Efforts in Poverty Eradication

M S. Beate Trankmann, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) Resident Representative in China, has a diverse career with the UNDP since the late 1990s, particularly in the Asia-Pacific region.

- ZHOU LIN

“Poverty reduction has always been the core of UNDP and its Chinesen office, and I have witnessed China’s unparalleled success in poverty alleviation,” she said.

China’s Unprecedented Achievement

By the end of 2020, China is to achieve a moderate prosperity society in all respects and accomplish its key goal in its 13th Five-Year Plan (2016-2020): ending extreme poverty. According to statistics released by the World Bank, since 1978, China has lifted more than 750 million people out of poverty, accounting for four-fifths of the world’s total over the last four decades. This is an unprecedented achievement in human history.

In 2019 when it celebrated the 40th anniversary of its inception in China, the UNDP released the 2019 Human Development Report. According to the report, China is the only country to have progressed from the low to the high human development category as is indicated by the global HDI trends the UNDP first began to analyze in 1990. The share of China’s population living below the poverty line has dropped from 97.5 percent in 1978 to just 1.7 percent today, while the per capita income of the Chinese people has increased 20-fold.

“Personally, I think China’s transformation is the result of continued political commitment and effective policy measures since the launching of reform and opening-up, and efforts of governments at all levels – from provinces to villages – to eradicate poverty. This allowed the government to selectively conduct pilot projects, addressing local problems on the ground through a targeted poverty alleviation approach – and taking successes to scale,” Trankmann said.