money & economicsOur World in Data1981 onward · China
Extreme poverty in China has been almost eliminated, urban areas first and then rural
In 1981, 97 percent of people in China's countryside lived in extreme poverty, and even in cities the share was above 70 percent. Over the following decades, rapid economic growth, market reforms and urbanisation pulled hundreds of millions of people out of poverty, with cities emptying poverty first and rural areas following. Today extreme poverty there is almost eliminated. The shift is one of the largest reductions in poverty in human history.
China's progress accounts for a large share of the global decline in extreme poverty, so it shapes overall world statistics. It shows how economic reform and industrialisation can change living standards at enormous scale.
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The majority of poverty in the People's Republic of China (PRC) is rural poverty. Decades of economic development has reduced urban extreme poverty. According to the World Bank, more than 850 million Chinese people have been lifted out of extreme poverty; China's poverty rate fell from 88 percent in 1981 to 0.7 percent in 2015, as measured by the percentage of people living on the equivalent of US$1.90 or less per day in 2011 purchasing price parity terms, which still stands in 2022.
The Chinese definition of extreme poverty is more stringent than that of the World Bank: earning less than $2.30 a day at purchasing power parity (PPP). Growth has fueled a substantial increase in per-capita income, lifting people out of extreme poverty. China's per capita income saw a five-fold increase, from $200 to $1,000 between 1990 and 2000. The same rate of increase was observed from 2000 to 2010, bringing the per capita income up to $5,000. This moved China into the ranks of middle-income countries.
From Wikipedia: Poverty in China (CC BY-SA 4.0) ↗
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