China’s rapidly evolving practice of poverty resettlement: Moving millions to eliminate poverty

Abstract

Motivation: Unlike in other places where resettlement is largely a by-product of large infrastructure projects, in China, resettlement is used as a tool for poverty alleviation. With the introduction of Xi Jinping’s Targeted Poverty Alleviation, and the goal to end absolute poverty by 2020, resettlement has become central to China’s poverty-alleviation practice. Rather than investing in dispersed, remote villages, the Chinese government prefers to bring people to development by constructing high-density resettlement sites in small towns and peri-urban areas: up to 16 million people are being resettled between 2016 and 2020. Despite the scale of these interventions, the English-language liter..