Veteran China observer says he has identified reasons for success of historic proportions.
It took two years for the World Bank and Chinese authorities to identify the drivers behind China's poverty alleviation over the past 40 years. It took Kenneth Quinn 40 years to conclude that building roads paved the country's way to prosperity.
Earlier this year the 189-member global lender and the Development Research Centre of China's State Council published a joint report, "Four Decades of Poverty Reduction in China: Drivers, Insights for the World, and the Way Ahead", looking at what is behind and beyond the "historically unprecedented" feat of lifting close to 800 million people out of poverty.
The report was a result of more than two years of field visits and workshops in which researchers said China's success derived from rapid economic growth, with broad-based economic transformation that opened opportunities and raised incomes of the poor.
The country's success was also built on effective governance that ensured implementation of both the growth strategy and targeted poverty-reduction policies, the report said.
For Quinn, president emeritus of the World Food Prize Foundation in Des Moines, the United States, China has been the most dramatically transformed country since 1978, mostly because it has virtually eliminated the lowest level of poverty for individuals.
Last year China declared that it had eradicated extreme poverty according to the national threshold, lifting 770 million people out of poverty since 1978 and accounting for nearly three-quarters of the global reduction in the number of people living in extreme poverty.
The eradication of absolute poverty in the world's most populous country just 42 years later is a "truly extraordinary" achievement, Quinn said.
"The most essential lead element in China's poverty-alleviation was the construction/improvement of farm-to-market roads that were repaired and rebuilt everywhere," Quinn said.
Over 40 years, Quinn said, he has visited China many times to observe the country's poverty-reduction processes and to talk with key participants and decision-makers.
On his first trip to China in October 1979 as part of a delegation of US state governors, Quinn said, he found widespread poverty.
He recalled meeting then-Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping, who emphasised the importance of the two steps China had just taken: its new policy of "opening to the world" and the establishment of diplomatic relations with the US.
Quinn said he then had the "remarkable opportunity" in October 1979 to travel widely throughout the country, including to Shanghai, Guangdong province and the Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region, to observe the economic situation firsthand.
"A comparison of 1980 Chinese highway maps with those of 2020 would demonstrate the clear linkage between the improvement and upgrading of rural roads and the reduction of poverty throughout the country," Quinn said.
For one thing, the upgrading of all-weather roads was the means by which new agricultural technologies, enhanced nutrition and expanded educational opportunities became available throughout the country, he said.
Sustained public investment in infrastructure, particularly in transport, was a catalyst for China's domestic market integration, providing the poor with improved access to markets to sell their produce and for their own consumption needs.
It also allowed the gains from China's export-led development and managed urbanisation to be shared with interior provinces and with rural areas, according to the joint study of the World Bank and China's State Council.
Just how heavily the country invested in intercity expressways can be gauged from the fact that the total length of expressways rose 44 per cent annually from 147 kilometres in 1988 to 25,130 km in 2002. By 2021 that had stretched to 169,100 km, according to the Chinese Ministry of Transport.
Quinn said other factors that have contributed to China's rapid rise out of poverty include widespread increased educational opportunities; the large-scale integration of women into the workforce; and the creation of a well-trained administrative, public service structure that successfully implements programmes throughout the country.
Jorge Chediek, the UN secretary-general's former envoy on South-South co-operation, said China's policies to reach the most disadvantaged populations allowed for the targeting of resources and opportunities to those who are generally the most difficult to reach in the development process.
He was referring to when China's poverty headcount dropped below 10 per cent of the rural population around 2012, and targeted poverty-alleviation and social-security systems started playing a more important role to "reach the last mile" of the remaining pockets of the poor.