“Poor families have received a lot of subsidies in the past two years,” said Liang Lu, who recently returned to the village after working for two years in Guangdong province, China’s most prosperous urban region. “Even ordinary villagers have seen the village become a lot more beautiful. My mother said that she is now embarrassed to spit on the street.”

The village, according to local Communist Party chief Luo Zhaohu, has received around 10 million yuan (US$1.4 million) in government funding since 2017 for a variety of projects and programmes, with the goal of lifting every village household above the poverty line, which was officially defined in 2011 by the government as a per capita net yearly income of 2,300 yuan (US$326) per person. The poverty line has since been adjusted each year for consumer inflation.

“It’s a huge amount of money for my village,” Luo said in his office under a red banner of a quote from President Xi Jinping stating that “we must win the tough battle of ending poverty”.

The poverty reduction campaign is “strict and comprehensive” and is aimed at ensuring that no one in the village has to worry about “food, clothing, housing, basic education or health care,” Luo added.

China’s achievements in poverty alleviation are unquestionable and recognised worldwide, said Shen Jianguang, chief economist at JD Digits, a unit of Chinese e-commerce firm JD.com. The movement has progressed very quickly because the Chinese leadership has made the eradication of poverty by next year its most important political and economic task, he noted.

In total, more than 850 million Chinese people have been lifted out of extreme poverty in the past 40 years, according to the World Bank. The country’s poverty rate – defined as the percentage of people living on the equivalent of US$1.90 or less per day – fell from 88 per cent in 1981 to 0.7 per cent in 2015.

Baoshan village highlights the success of the government’s massive poverty eradication campaign, but at the same time the question remains whether the success is sustainable or simply a temporary improvement due to the high level of government funding. The government’s ability to consolidate the effect of poverty alleviation and let the rural economy continue to grow is the main problem for the future, according to Shen.

Luo, the village chief, has already started to worry about when the poverty alleviation subsidies and funds dry up next year once the village is no longer officially designated as being poor and it then must find a replacement sustainable source of revenue.

Like many local governments, Wan’an county runs a budget deficit, with spending greater than revenue. Tax revenue sharing and subsidies from the Jiangxi provincial government and the central government in Beijing keeps the county solvent. However, Jiangxi province also runs a budget deficit, in part due to the personal and business tax cuts mandated over the last two years by Beijing. The slowdown in the Chinese economy this year has also eroded the fiscal position of all levels of Chinese government, which could impact the ability to fully support the anti-poverty programme in future.

A new orange grove on the outskirts of the village will provide a key source of revenue when the trees start to produce fruit in a few years, according to a message board at the entrance of the orchard. Some 40 per cent of the orchard’s crop will belong to the village’s collective account, 30 per cent will be used to pay for the running of the village, while the remaining 30 per cent will be given to the poorest families in the village, according to the message board.

There are few manufacturing or trading activities in the village despite government sweeteners, including a 50,000 yuan (US$7,000) bonus for any business that employs more than 20 local staff. The only manufacturing business in the village is an electronics workshop that employs around 20 workers, while another small factory that makes bean curd milk employs about the same number.

Around 800 villagers, mainly young and middle-aged men and women, have left to work as migrant workers. Villagers in Baoshan earn an average annual income of 6,000 yuan, according to local Communist Party chief Luo, although it is still not enough to pay for a flat in the town centre of Wan’an county, with many households forced to take out large loans to buy property.

Foxconn, most commonly known for assembling iPhones, is known for its high staff turnover, largely because of the low monthly salary of around 2,100 yuan per month (US$297) in Zhengzhou, Henan province. In Dongguan in Guangdong province, a footwear factory worker earns around 4,000 yuan per month, including overtime, while in Guangxi the figure could drop to around 3,000 yuan per month.

While Chinese Communist Party leaders have talked about helping the poor since they took power in 1949, progress on the ground has been slow. During the days of Mao Zedong, who ruled China from 1949 to 1976, some government programmes led to hunger and famine in the countryside. And under the leadership of Deng Xiaoping, who started China’s economic liberalisation in the late 1970s and 1980s, and his successor, Jiang Zemin, from 1993 to 2003, there was a sharp widening of the gap between urban and rural incomes as the government focused its attention on developing urban zones in the coastal areas.

The direction of government policy began to change under Hu Jintao, who ruled between 2003 to 2013. China abolished agriculture taxes, waived fees for the first nine years of public education in rural areas, and set up a basic social welfare network in the countryside. But poverty remained widespread with Chinese official data showing that 99 million people still lived in absolute poverty at the end of 2012 when Hu left office.

Xi made the eradication of poverty a central tenet of his administration – the first of the three key battles for the government to fight, along with controlling risks and reducing pollution. Xi has repeatedly urged provincial and municipal officials to look after those most in need in their region. One popular story says that when Xi visited a rich province, he interrupted the provincial governor’s bragging about the regional economy and told him “please tell me the situation of the poorest village in your province”.

In 2015, Xi set a deadline of 2020 to totally eradicate poverty in China. It is a key part of his goal of building China into a comprehensive well-off society by 2021, when the Communist Party will celebrate its 100th anniversary.

By the end of 2018, the number of Chinese living in absolute poverty had fallen to 16.6 million, according to Chinese government statistics, out of a population of 1.4 billion.

Luo, the Baoshan village chief, said the pressure to help the poor is so great that local officials have repeatedly visited impoverished households to “help them clean their toilets and clothes” to ensure they feel the improvement in their lives.

To ensure the cleanliness of the village, one of the indicators used to measure the performance of the anti-poverty programme, government officials have employed drones to ensure that villagers are properly trained to put rubbish into the proper bins and not litter, Luo said.

In his office, one wall is almost fully covered with a table listing the names of all 728 villagers as well as a progress table showing how many people have been lifted out of poverty. The number of people living under the poverty line has been reduced to 11, according to Luo.

Direct subsidies have played a significant role in the village with aid for a single household to rebuild or renovate their home having been increased to 38,000 yuan (US$5,400) in 2018 from 28,000 yuan in 2017 and 15,000 yuan in 2016 – and is now around a quarter of the average of 160,000 yuan needed to build a two-floor house.

Villagers who cannot afford to fix their own homes can relocate to a two-room flat provided by the government at no cost. The decoration is basic but it has functioning water, electricity and a cement floor, with a slogan painted on the exterior of the building stating “flats with love and home to poverty alleviation”.

One villager who had accepted the offer, a women in her sixties, said that the flat was much closer to the town centre, cutting significantly the time needed to take her granddaughter to school every day.