Poverty Alleviation at a Price: The Diverging Impact of Tuopin Campaign on Urban and Rural Dibao Recipients in China

Dibao, China's principal pillar of social assistance since the late 1990s, is directly related to poverty affairs. Previous literature draws on decentralism theory, local budgets, bureaucracy, trade openness, and social unrest factors to explain Dibao's distribution and fairness. Meanwhile, preceding studies indicated the urban bias in the social assistance system that targeted urban impoverishment while neglecting similar issues in the countryside. Although the poverty alleviation campaign (tuopin) launched in 2021 was officially declared successful, in which the aggregate number of Dibao recipients has reduced significantly afterward, its effects on poverty amelioration in underdeveloped regions remain moot.

Thus, this article aims to examine the impact of the tuopin campaign on Dibao by measuring the latter’s coverage and benefit level among the regions of different development levels. This research applies difference-in-difference-in-differences (DDD) approaches with a database collected from the Chinese government. The primary empirical results demonstrate that during and after the TPA campaign, the coverage of Dibao recipients slightly decreased in urban areas while increasing in rural regions. This suggests that fewer urban people required assistance, while rural areas saw an expansion in Dibao support. Notably, the parallel trend assumption (PTA) for rural Dibao coverage was not met, indicating that the rural Dibao expansion was not directly attributable to the TPA campaign. Nevertheless, the gap between Dibao thresholds in underprivileged regions and their prosperous counterparts widened significantly during and after the TPA campaign, especially in rural areas. Since the PTA held for Dibao thresholds, these empirical results underscore the persistence and even exacerbation of urban-rural inequality. This finding underpins our central argument that the tuopin campaign may have alleviated overall poverty at a high price of the unintended increase in urban-rural disparity. Meanwhile, China’s urban-oriented governance remains entrenched and even reinforced, calling the campaign’s claims of promoting social integration into question.