Abstract:

As a "package of projects", the targeted poverty alleviation strategy has accelerated economic, social and spatial reconstruction of rural areas. This paper aims to conduct a theoretical analysis of the connotation, characteristics, process, and mechanism of targeted poverty alleviation that drives poor rural reconstruction and provide empirical evidence of Shibadong Village, which is the first initiative of targeted poverty alleviation. It is found that targeted poverty alleviation is a process of multidimensional, comprehensive, and rapid reconstruction that is led by the government with multi-party participation in combination of "top-down" and "bottom-up" approaches. The process of targeted poverty alleviation changes the poor rural areas from 'low-level poverty equilibrium' to 'healthy development equilibrium' through a combination of administrative power, sending elites to the village level, improving market accessibility, and coordination of factor integration, motivation, planning, training and institutional guarantee mechanisms. Since the implementation of the targeted poverty alleviation, Shibadong Village has transformed from a dualistic economy to a pluralist economy, from a pure acquaintance society to a semi-acquaintance society with a mixture of acquaintance logic and contract spirit, and from a spatial form highly overlapped from the production and living spaces, yet separated from the ecological space to a diverse and orderly cluster of organic integration of production, living and ecological space. The practice of Shibadong Village provides a fresh sample for us to understand the process and mechanism of the restructuring of poverty-stricken villages, and it is also an essential embodiment of its "reproducible and extendable" experience.

Key words: target poverty alleviation, rural reconstruction, process and mechanism, Shibadong Village