Mediated Urbanization and Poverty Reduction: How Institutions and Policy Shape Welfare Outcomes in Urbanizing China

This article examines whether and how urbanization has contributed to poverty reduction in China from the late twentieth century to the mid-2020s. Although rapid urban expansion and large-scale poverty reduction have unfolded concurrently, their causal relationship remains analytically contested. Drawing on a qualitative synthesis of official statistics, policy documents, and empirical research, the study analyses how expanded labor market access associated with rural–urban mobility reshaped welfare outcomes across income, housing, education, and social protection. The analysis traces how these dynamics evolved as China’s urbanization moved from early phases of large-scale labor mobility toward increasingly institutionalized forms of urban incorporation. The findings show that urbanization’s contribution to poverty reduction was neither automatic nor uniform. Instead, welfare outcomes emerged through mediated urbanization, understood as an evolving process constituted by structural enabling, institutional conversion, and policy stabilization, through which expanded economic participation was progressively translated into usable entitlements and protected against urbanization-generated vulnerabilities. The article argues that durable poverty reduction occurred where this process evolved over time through the mutual adjustment of economic opportunity, institutional arrangements, and policy intervention, highlighting the roles of state institutions and host societies in translating spatial mobility into sustained welfare improvement.