Chapter 2
Where Did China's Poverty Alleviation Approach Come From?

Introduction: Poverty is a stubborn blight in human society, a common challenge as well as a major global issue in the process of economic and social development in all countries. China used to be a nation with the largest impoverished population, and was also one of the first countries to provide national aid to the poor. Over its thousands of years of history, China has always put helping the poor and improving people's well-being high on its list of priorities. Poverty eradication has always been the Chinese nation's relentless pursuit, illustrated by the utopian ideas of "Benevolence" (Ren'ai), "People-oriented Doctrine" (Minben), "Universal Love" (Jian'ai) and "The Great Harmony" (Datong) advocated by the pre-Qin philosophers, as well as the Chinese Communist Party's mission of eliminating poverty and improving people's livelihood. The historic mission of Chinese Communists is to seek happiness for the Chinese people and rejuvenation for the Chinese nation. This chapter offers a retrospective of how the Communist Party of China (CPC) led the people in the fight against poverty by setting 1949, 1978, and 2012 as the timeline nodes to fully demonstrate how the Chinese people carried out their ideas and actions of poverty alleviation, in the hope of seeking the origin for China's poverty alleviation approach.

As the largest developing country, China has a millenary history of culture tinged with poverty alleviation. The pre-Qin periods already saw the emergence of the idea that "helping the poor is benevolence". Under the influence of Confucian culture, ancient China gradually formed a charitable tradition based on the "People-oriented Doctrine" and "The Great Harmony", with individuals, neighbors, clans, clubs, institutions or the government carrying out charitable relief activities, thus laying the foundation for thinking and actions of charitable causes in China. In modern times, in the face of China's poverty and backwardness, along with the modernization process spurred by the invasion of Western forces, Chinese patriots, with Sun Yat-sen as the representative, proposed the idea of improving the people's well-being and rescuing society by advocating a government-led social relief system, which formed the prototype of modern China's social relief system. Meanwhile, a group of economists and sociologists carried out investigations and studies on rural poverty using modern Western development concepts and research methods, and implemented extensive rural development projects, greatly raising the awareness of poverty in China's modern society and promoting its anti-poverty cause.

In 1921, after a long period of struggle and defeat, the Chinese Communist Party was born in response to people's need and the historic mission. Since its inception, the Party has been upholding its mission of eradicating poverty, improving people's livelihood, and achieving common prosperity by establishing the Chinese socialist system to radically eradicate poverty, embarking on a magnificent journey of making a strong country and making the people prosperous on this ancient land of China. From the New Democratic Revolution, socialist transformation, reform and opening, to today's new era, generations of Chinese Communists upheld the original idea of serving the people by constantly fighting against poverty and eventually achieving remarkable achievements that have figured prominently and written up a great chapter in the human history of fighting against poverty. Especially after the founding of PRC, the CPC gradually raised the Chinese people out of the poverty, and made relentless efforts to achieve common prosperity for everyone. In November 2012, the Party convened the 18 ^th National Congress, ushering in a new era for socialism with Chinese characteristics. The CPC Central Committee with Comrade Xi Jinping at its core put poverty alleviation at the top of its governance agenda to comprehensively launch a fight against poverty. Nowadays, China – a country once with the world's biggest impoverished population – is fighting against poverty under the guidance of Xi Jinping's poverty alleviation ideas, continuously creating unseen miracles of poverty reduction in human history.