The Global Partnership for Poverty Alleviation and Development (GPPAD) was launched on Wednesday in Beijing, marking a milestone in global poverty reduction endeavors, as China's evolving anti-poverty strategy drew attention from across the globe.
Unveiled at the 2026 Global Poverty Reduction and Development Forum, the partnership, jointly initiated by China, 53 other countries and nine international organizations, will serve as an international platform to share experience and explore pathways to eradicate poverty.
At the forum, Chinese Vice Premier Liu Guozhong pledged that China will support the GPPAD in strengthening policy dialogue, technical demonstration and talent training to help developing countries build stronger capacity in terms of poverty reduction.
This commitment is backed by China's own poverty reduction achievements. After lifting 98.99 million rural poor out of poverty by 2020, the country established a five-year transition period to consolidate gains.
In 2025, per capita disposable income of rural residents in formerly impoverished counties reached 18,627 yuan (about 2,729.6 U.S. dollars). Over the transition period, the average annual growth rate hit 8.2 percent, outpacing the national rural average.
A SUSTAINED APPROACH
In its 15th Five-Year Plan (2026-2030), China mandates regular mechanisms for preventing rural residents from lapsing or relapsing into poverty, marking a systemic shift from a time-bound campaign to institutionalized, long-term governance.
Kevin Chen, senior research fellow at the International Food Policy Research Institute, noted at the forum that China combined top-down surveys with bottom-up grassroots participation to build a dynamic poverty registry.
In targeted assistance, China tailors measures to household conditions: industrial, employment or skills training for those able to work, and social safety nets for those unable to do so. At-risk households are identified through self-reporting, cadre screening and cross-department early-warning alerts, with monitoring thresholds adjusted annually.
Chen Shuqin, a villager in Henan Province in central China, is among the more than 7 million people who have avoided falling back into poverty thanks to assistance from this system. After torrential rains destroyed her home in 2021, village officials immediately assessed her situation, registered her family for monitoring, and swiftly deployed subsidized house rebuilding, relief funds and poverty-prevention insurance.
"Rebuilding the house would have cost us 70,000 to 80,000 yuan, but in the end we only paid just over 10,000 yuan," Chen said. She was also offered a local job, and the family soon pulled through.
Beyond safety nets, the deeper logic of China's approach is building endogenous development capacity. Li Xiaoyun, a professor at China Agricultural University, has spent a decade practicing a farmer-driven model in villages across Yunnan Province in southwest China, empowering locals to turn external resources into self-driven growth.
"Income comes from labor, not from waiting for handouts," Li said. Development-oriented support transforms welfare-style handouts into participatory capacity-building, enabling the poor to regain confidence via their own efforts.
Another institutional innovation is "paired-assistance relationship," a nationwide mobilization endeavor that pairs eastern provinces with western counterparts and dispatches over 3 million public officials directly to village households.
Businesses and developed eastern regions had contributed resources and expertise to help rural residents participate in economic activities, according to Robert Walker, a professor at Beijing Normal University and an emeritus fellow at Green Templeton College, University of Oxford.
"The public widely recognizes that poverty is a shared societal issue, not a personal burden," he said, adding that at the core of China's efforts is a commitment to putting people first.
SHARED EXPERIENCE
For Martha Viviana Carvajalino Villegas, Colombia's minister of agriculture and rural development, China's victory in poverty reduction is also "a victory for the entire world."
"It demonstrates that, with agrarian reform, agro-industrialization, massive public investment and sustained political will, poverty can be overcome," she said.
As the first goal of the UN 2030 Agenda, ending poverty remains an urgent global mission.
"Every year we talk about the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), but there are still countries that have failed to achieve the goal of 'zero poverty,'" said Suhaiza Zailani, director of the Ungku Aziz Centre for Development Studies, University of Malaya.
China's approach has proven remarkably resilient amid rising global shocks. Maximo Torero Cullen, chief economist of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, said that by investing heavily in rural infrastructure, agricultural innovation and human capital, China addresses multidimensional poverty challenges rather than focusing solely on income.
By 2026, China's impoverished areas had seen 1.1 million kilometers of rural roads built or upgraded, with all qualified townships and villages connected by paved roads and bus services, while 5G networks covered over 95 percent of villages.
All 832 formerly impoverished counties have cultivated two to three leading industries, with the number of previously poor workers in stable employment exceeding 30 million for five consecutive years.
During a localized project in Tanzania, Li Xiaoyun drew on China's experience in labor-intensive farming and adapted it to African realities. Practices such as high-density maize planting have helped local communities break dependency on costly external inputs through self-reliant solutions.
"China offers parallel experiences rather than rigid templates," he said. "What is valuable is providing experiences that can be compared, discussed and adapted."
