Have Water Conservancy Project Resettlers in Contemporary China Really Been Lifted Out of Poverty? Re-Measurement Based on Relative Poverty and Consumption Poverty

Ziheng Shangguan, Jianping Liu (), Mark Yaolin Wang, Shaojun Chen and Ruilian Zhang
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Ziheng Shangguan: School of Business, Hubei University, Wuhan 430062, China
Jianping Liu: School of Business, Hubei University, Wuhan 430062, China
Mark Yaolin Wang: School of Geography, Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, The University of Melbourne, Melbourne, VIC 3010, Australia
Shaojun Chen: School of Public Administration, National Research Centre for Resettlement, Hohai University, Nanjing 211100, China
Ruilian Zhang: Centre for Social Responsibility in Mining, Sustainable Minerals Institute, The University of Queensland, Brisbane, QLD 4072, Australia

Land, 2023, vol. 12, issue 1, 1-15

Abstract: Those who have been forced to resettle by water conservancy projects (WCP) have always been a group that is characterised by high poverty and livelihood vulnerability, mainly due to insufficient compensation and the fragmentation of their social networks. In 2020, the Chinese government announced that China had achieved comprehensive poverty alleviation, implying that all WCP-induced resettlers, have been lifted out of poverty. However, China’s current poverty line is based on the minimum subsistence standard, namely the absolute poverty line, which fails to objectively reflect China’s uneven development and individuals’ actual consumption needs. Therefore, in order to comprehensively analyse the poverty status of WCP-induced resettlers in contemporary China, this paper reassessed the poverty status of contemporary WCP-induced resettlers from the perspective of development-based poverty and consumption-based poverty. Based on survey data from over 1000 households who were forced to resettle due to China’s ‘Yangtze River to Huai River Inter-basin Water Diversion’ project, this paper concludes that: (1) China’s current absolute poverty line is outdated for contemporary WCP-induced resettlers, due to the fact they had basically been lifted out of absolute poverty by 2018, and those who remain poor need to be addressed through the bottom line guarantee of local governments; (2) the role of land as a form of basic insurance can alleviate income inequality and mitigate the risk of force majeure. Therefore, those resettled from rural areas have stronger income stability and greater resilience to risks; (3) the poverty status of contemporary WCP-induced resettlers is mainly consumption-based, and it is worse for resettlers from urban areas. Based on these conclusions, we suggest that the government should try to avoid large-scale relocation of WCP-induced resettlers to urban areas, and try to provide more insurances to them, such as providing arable land and sharing the benefits of water conservancy projects with the resettlers.

Keywords: relative poverty; consumption poverty; WCP-induced resettlers; China (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q15 Q2 Q24 Q28 Q5 R14 R52 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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