FT report on China’s poverty reduction reflects Western misunderstanding

British sociologist Robert Walker has recently pushed back against an earlier article by the Financial Times that questioned whether China had truly eliminated extreme poverty, saying that the report reflected a broader Western misunderstanding of China’s poverty alleviation campaign.

“The Financial Times article was really disappointing as I spent an hour and a half talking to the journalists,” Walker said during an interview at the 2026 Global Poverty Reduction and Development Forum, which concluded in Beijing on Thursday. “There was an assumption that poverty still existed in that sense.”

Walker, an emeritus professor at the University of Oxford and a professor at Beijing Normal University, who has long studied poverty in China and internationally, said the newspaper “disbelieved and set out to prove its own disbelief”, arguing that it used isolated examples to challenge broader achievements.

“You could always find an example and partially tell the story,” he said.

The remarks followed a Financial Times article published in March that questioned China’s declaration that it had eradicated extreme poverty by the end of 2020. Walker, who was quoted in the report, later published a rebuttal article titled Media Mythmaking: Mistake, Mischief or Malevolence?, in which he criticized the five recurring techniques used in Western narratives about China, including the use of anecdotal evidence and “moving the benchmark”.

Walker said that part of the disagreement stemmed from different understandings of poverty between China and the West. “The concept of poverty understood in the West is different from the concept of poverty that is part of the political lexicon in China,” he said.

The Financial Times relied on the World Bank’s higher poverty line for upper-middle-income countries — about $8.30 per day — to argue that China still faced widespread poverty. However, Walker argued that China’s development strategy had effectively addressed this threshold through sustained economic growth and by rising living standards.

“What I was able to show was that China did address that, although it didn’t do so explicitly,” he said. “It focused on sustainable growth.”

And as economic growth rose, so did living standards, he added.

Walker said that poverty is a process rather than a static condition, and that China’s transformation since reform and opening-up should be viewed as part of a historical journey. “Its journey in terms of its economy, in terms of its social welfare structures, in terms of the way China sees itself — it’s amazing. But it’s a journey.”

Walker said that the country has developed innovative and highly coordinated approaches that could offer other nations useful lessons.

He highlighted the nationwide mobilization system, in which the eradication of poverty became a clearly defined political objective coordinated across central and local governments.

One of the most notable aspects of this system was its targeted poverty alleviation approach, which involved creating detailed registries of impoverished households and assigning officials to work directly with families, he said, adding that the system recognized that poverty was often caused by structural issues such as poor infrastructure and a lack of opportunity rather than individual failure.

Stressing that “China is unique” and that its political system played an important role in its poverty reduction efforts, Walker said that the principles behind its approach could be adopted by other countries.

He added that countries could adapt ideas such as social mobilization, empowerment and people-centered governance according to their own cultural and political contexts.

The country’s emphasis on collective welfare has contributed to public trust in the government.

“People have faith that the Communist Party of China and its governmental system are working on behalf of the people,” he said, adding that China could improve the way it communicates its development story internationally by presenting a more balanced picture that includes challenges and setbacks alongside achievements.

Drawing on his own field research in China, Walker said that he had witnessed officials facing difficult choices, making mistakes and learning from them during the poverty alleviation campaign.

“It’s not a simple journey. It’s a stepwise process — going forward, going back, learning.”