Since reform and opening-up, China has emphasized a development-oriented approach to poverty alleviation. In contemporary China, labor is the main determinant of distribution, with individuals paid according to their work. For this reason, poverty reduction is achieved primarily by enabling people to earn income through useful employment.

At the same time, China has balanced its development-driven measures with welfare-oriented tools.

For example, as not all rural households could support themselves through work, the minimum living allowance system, known as the dibao system, was extended to rural areas in 2007. This program provided unconditional cash transfers to the rural poor.

In 2003, a new rural cooperative medical system — an affordable public insurance program for rural residents that covers inpatient services and catastrophic illnesses, with rising reimbursement rates — was put in place. By 2013, this program had covered nearly 99 percent of the rural population.

The targeted poverty alleviation program, launched in 2013, continued along this path.

In particular, members of poor households were identified not just in terms of livelihood circumstances and income-generation capabilities, but also in terms of their access to education and healthcare. Attention was also paid to targeted support for people whose special circumstances, such as illness and disability, prevented participation in paid work.

By the end of 2020, the targeted poverty alleviation campaign had eradicated absolute poverty. The 98.99 million people who remained under the threshold in 2012 were lifted out of poverty, with many moving well above the threshold. All the 832 impoverished counties and 128,000 poor villages were lifted out of poverty. As a result, living standards of the people involved improved significantly.

With the completion of the program in 2020, the goals changed to addressing the risks that people might fall back into poverty, as well as rural vitalization, the normalization of support, enhanced social assistance and continuing efforts to equalize the provision of public services.

China also is moving toward the broader goal of achieving common prosperity, and the country's development philosophy has evolved in a more multidimensional direction, in which its high-quality development incorporates environmental sustainability, social well-being, human-centered development and public participation.

The concept of common prosperity emerged in the 1950s. At the end of the 1970s, China decided to let some people and places prosper first, and at that time the late Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping repeatedly insisted that the people and places that did prosper must then help everyone else and all other regions to join them.

China addresses this challenge in a number of ways. As in the case of the poverty alleviation campaign, it invests in infrastructure, skills and industries, and mobilizes cadres to generate employment that increases primary real wage incomes. It also mobilizes collective urban and rural assets to generate property income.

At their core, these measures reflect China's development-oriented approach that common prosperity ultimately depends on people's ability to earn, and not just on redistribution.

Although income from work will remain the mainstay, in the years ahead, one can anticipate significant changes in the secondary distribution of income as a result of changes in taxation, public services, social security, social assistance and transfer payments.

Furthermore, China's system of counterpart assistance — under which well-off cities contribute to the development of less well-off places as one aspect of tertiary distribution — will continue to play an important role.

Every prefecture in the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region, for example, is paired with a more developed city, which must provide resources to help every tier of local government enhance local development, services and prosperity.

The international discussion around China's poverty alleviation achievements is methodological but also driven by political ideologies and narratives.

In China, the right to subsistence and right to development are considered fundamental human rights. Moreover, the nation's approach is scientific, employing comprehensive data rather than individual case studies whose representativeness cannot be established.

Its strategy involves institutional mechanisms that integrate a clear overall central design, subnational responsibility and decentralized implementation at the city, county and local levels, alongside an extraordinary mobilization of financial and human resources.

In many capitalist countries, explanations of poverty differ, and more emphasis is placed on market mechanisms, private property rights and nongovernmental organizations.

On the methodological side, poverty lines are usually expressed in terms of real income and change over time.

China has entered the ranks of upper-middle-income economies while remaining the world's largest developing country. The World Bank recently substantially increased the poverty line for such economies, first introduced in 2017, to $8.30 per person per day in 2021 purchasing power parity terms. By this higher benchmark, 21.3 percent of China's population fell below the line in 2022, compared with 48.3 percent worldwide.

However, this measure is based primarily on household cash income and may not fully capture China's property ownership and social entitlements, including food and clothing needs, access to compulsory education, basic medical services and safe housing — the core criteria of its poverty alleviation framework, known as the "Two Assurances and Three Guarantees".

At the same time, according to the 15th Five-Year Plan (2026-30), the pursuit of common prosperity will now pay attention not just to expanding the middle-income group, but also to raising low incomes.

The powerful narrative that China constructed therefore broadly holds, even if one should exercise great care in extrapolating backward.

The author is a professor emeritus at the University of Sussex in the United Kingdom.

The views do not necessarily reflect those of China Daily.