Urbanisation of poverty in China

Yunpeng Zhang

Chapter 4 in A Modern Guide to Urban Poverty, 2026, pp 89-105 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: Over the past four decades, China has achieved significant progress in poverty reduction. This is particularly evident in the top-down political campaign launched by the party-state under Xi Jinping to eliminate absolute poverty between 2013 and 2021. This chapter first reviews China's efforts, focusing on the enduring influence of the urban–rural divide on the pathways to poverty and the approaches to govern poverty. It then advances the notion of the urbanisation of poverty to conceive poverty in a more inclusive way and foreground the interplay between the rural and the urban in shaping the dynamics of poverty. Through this lens, this chapter examines two cases – the development rights transfer and the construction of new cities – and unravels the ways in which urbanisation in concentrated and extended forms produce material, symbolic and experiential poverty. This inclusive view of poverty suggests that China still faces significant challenges to address poverty.

Keywords: Urbanisation of Poverty; Development Rights Tranfer; Urban Expansion; Symbolic Poverty; China (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026
ISBN: 9781800889682
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