4. From 2012 Onwards: The Final Step in the Fight Against Poverty to Welcome a Moderately Prosperous Society in All Respects

One year before the 18 ^th CPC National Congress (2011), the CPC Central Committee and the State Council issued the Outline for Development-oriented Poverty Reduction for Rural China (2011-2020) , emphasizing that "development-oriented poverty alleviation is a long-term historic task." China remains in and will be in the primary stage of socialism for a long time, where the recipients of poverty alleviation are numerous, the problem of relative poverty is highlighted, the phenomenon of returning to poverty occurs from time to time, and impoverished areas – especially those contiguous impoverished areas that are difficult to develop –are relative backwaters. As such, implementing development-oriented poverty alleviation is still a daunting task.

In 2012, the Party's 18 ^th National Congress elected a new central leadership. China's development entered a new historical stage of comprehensively deepening reform, and its economic development also entered a new normal in economic development. The country moved forward with the Five-sphere Integrated Plan and the Four-Pronged Comprehensive Strategy, putting forward new concepts to lead all walks of life to build a moderately prosperous society in all respects and to achieve the CPC's first centenary goal of entering the final stage of working determinedly to prevail, signaling that socialism with Chinese characteristics had entered a new era. At the time, China still faced a severe situation in terms of poverty reduction because it still had a large population living in profound poverty, and the solutions to their problems were becoming increasingly costly and harder to accomplish. In other words, China entered the crucial stage of poverty reduction – this would prove a hard nut to crack.

The statistics by the National Bureau of Statistics of China show that, based on the national rural poverty standard of RMB2,300 per capita net income of rural households (at 2010 prices), the number of rural poor in China was 98.99 million in 2012, with the incidence of poverty standing at 10.2%. In other words, the masses of impoverished people are trapped in profound poverty, and most of them live in remote, old revolutionary base areas, areas with large ethnic minority populations, border areas, and ecologically vulnerable regions with limited resources. The increasing cost and complexity of poverty eradication result from the extreme degree of poverty afflicting these people with weak capacity for development, and they tend to return to poverty because of illness, natural disasters, and lack of education and stable abilities to raise themselves out of poverty. In the provinces and autonomous regions of Inner Mongolia, Guangxi, Guizhou, Yunnan, Tibet, Qinghai, Ningxia, Xinjiang, the incidence of rural poverty exceeded 20%. The per capita income of rural residents in poverty-stricken areas is RMB4,732, equivalent to 59.8% of the per capita income of rural residents nationwide, and the gap is larger than that of urban areas.

Behind the numbers is a "question horizon" intertwined with various complex problems. In some remote mountainous areas, children have to spend 2-3 hours walking to school, a situation that often results in an increasing dropout rate. The medical expenditures of farmers in key poverty-stricken counties are only 60% of the national average in rural areas, and many sick farmers don't have access to timely medical treatments. In these impoverished areas, the proportion of illiterate and semi-literate laborers is 3.6% higher than that of the whole country, with 8.3% of rural households still living in bamboo and adobe cottages. There are 3,917 villages across China without access to electricity, affecting nearly 3.8 million people. In the contiguous impoverished areas, 38.62 million rural residents and 6.01 million teachers and students still lack safe drinking water. There are still nearly 100,000 administrative villages without cement asphalt roads.

From the general poverty to special groups in need such as the old, the weak, the sick and those with disabilities; with the multi-dimensional poverty of economic deprivation, insufficient income, and lack of education and medical treatments; and from the regional widespread poverty to "dotted distribution" – The poor population have undergone significant changes in structure, type and distribution, not only increasing the difficulty of development-oriented poverty alleviation measures, but also raising new requirements for the development-oriented poverty eradication policies and models.

The Liangshan Prefecture, Sichuan Province, is famous for its "magnificent rows of peaks and coldness throughout the year". Living in a typical region of "direct transition from primitive to socialist society," or so-called "spanning thousands of years of human development with one step," the Yi people have long been isolated from the outside world. They sought survival in a time of war and chaos by migrating and prospering in the high, mid-level and high-elevation, cold mountainous areas of Large and Small Liangshan (namely, the Liangshan Yi Autonomous Prefecture and its surrounding areas). This ethnic minority lead a nomadic life of "ploughing across the mountains" in scattered, small groups, thus becoming a special sample of extreme poverty in China. Among the 17 counties in the Prefecture, 11 ethnic minority counties are the key counties for national development-oriented poverty alleviation work, accounting for one-third of such impoverished counties in Sichuan Province. Contiguous poverty-stricken areas contain 41,600 square kilometers, accounting for 68.9% of the total region. There are 1,618 poverty-stricken villages, of which 166 are in extremely poverty, with an impoverished population of 528,800 and an incidence rate of 11.9%. As such, the region is a place where the poverty problem is most prominent, the cause of poverty the most complicated, and the task of poverty alleviation the most burdensome.

Before the latest round of development-oriented poverty alleviation, the poor Yi people basically lived in stone, tile-roofed or thatched cottages – low, damp, and ill-sheltered – where people and animals lived together. They lived on "fermented vegetables, buckwheat cakes (leavened bread), and potatoes". And 11 impoverished counties were not connected to highways, and remote areas still relied on people or packhorses to carry goods on their backs. An expert on Yi society once said, "Many young adults in the Yi rural areas do not speak standard Chinese. The people there generally raise large families – the poorer they are, the more kids they have; the more children they have, the poorer they become, hence a vicious cycle; drug use and AIDS are also rampant; the Yi people still have the outmoded customs of 'meager subsistence for the living yet decent burial for the dead', high bride prices, and showing off or comparing social status, all of which exacerbate their social problems."

In 2016, The Beijing News published an article titled "A Village on the Cliff" on Atuleer, a remote village in the Zhi'ermo Township of Zhaojue County, Sichuan Province. The villagers must climb 17 rattan ladders leaning on the cliffs to reach the outside world. Having attracted wide attention, Atuleer has become a "cliff village" well known across China. Perching on the steep slopes of the Meigu River Canyon, the village is home to 72 households. It is 1,400 meters above sea level and 800 meters above the ground. Despite its proximity to the outside world, Atuleer does not have telephone access. The 800-meter cliffs and the 218 dilapidated rattan rungs constitute an "extremely dangerous journey" back home, making it a nightmare for the kids to go to school and return home once a week. In Liangshan, there are 85 particularly impoverished "cliff villages", 40% of which are higher than Atuleer, and there are over 1,600 villages are located in stone deserts. In other words, this is the largest contiguous poverty-stricken areas in Sichuan, or even in China.

In the face of these living in extreme poverty and with the decreasing effect of poverty reduction due to economic development, China is facing a formidable task of promoting fair and efficient development and achieving coordinated development in urban and rural areas, while ensuring that everyone can join a moderately prosperous society.

However, it should also be noted that over the past 40 years of reform and opening up, China has raised more than 700 million rural people out of poverty, carving out a Chinese-style path of development-oriented poverty alleviation of "government guidance, social participation, and self-reliance", thus laying a solid foundation for the "last kilometer" (final leg) of building a moderately prosperous society in all respects and eliminating rural poverty. In particular, with China's deepening industrialization, IT application, urbanization, marketization, and internationalization, its economic development mode is accelerating, the national economy is maintaining steady and rapid development, composite national strength is being significantly enhanced, and the social security system improved – all this has created favorable environment and conditions for development-oriented poverty alleviation.

Since the 18 ^th National Congress of the CPC, China has made tremendous progress in economic and social development. On the one hand, the CPC Central Committee has unswervingly sought strict governance over the Party to make significant progress in Party building. The Party's power to unite, energy to fight, ability to lead, and charisma to inspire have all been significantly strengthened; the very foundation of the Party's governance and public support have been consolidated, providing political guarantees for the development of the Party and the country's all causes. On the other hand, following the new development concept of innovative, coordinated, green, open and inclusive development, China has deepened reform in all areas and advanced law-based governance, thus making major progress in national economic and social development. Nowadays, China's composite national strength has been steadily enhanced, its national governance capabilities and the level of modernization of the governance system have been continuously strengthened; its GDP ranks the second in the world, and the country's technological development and its applications are advancing with each passing day, thus laying the human, financial and material basis for evolving development-oriented poverty eradication, increasing the spending on poverty alleviation, continuing development-oriented poverty eradication, and wining the fight against poverty.

Therefore, in the face of the reality that economic development has led to diminishing returns on poverty alleviation, along with the structural characteristics of the poor population's dotted distribution and multi-dimensional poverty, China must perfect, adjust and select its development-oriented poverty alleviation modes, and innovate and update its poverty eradication ideas and theories before building a moderately prosperous society in all respects and fulfilling the first centenary goal and historic task. Against this context, Xi Jinping's idea on poverty alleviation came into being and became the fundamental guideline for China's fight against poverty in the new era.