China’s poverty alleviation is often credited to central planning. But Zhiqi Xu shows how a centrally connected organisation created a grassroots eco-tourism model. Here, she reveals how community-driven solutions can gain ground in a top-down system
China’s poverty alleviation campaign stunned the world with its pace and scale. Spearheaded by top-down state mobilisation, it deployed sweeping interventions — from infrastructure and relocation to industrialisation and labour transfer — all enforced through rigid targets and bureaucratic pressure.
But in a command-driven policy system, could an experiment in local ownership ever grow beyond the village level?
The story of the Britevilla* programme shows that local ownership can succeed, but only through patience, adaptability, and learning by doing.
The organisation behind Britevilla — let’s call it C* — didn’t begin with tourism in mind. Founded as a government-organised non-governmental organisation (GONGO) to receive international aid funding, it gradually broke away from state funding and personnel control, gaining operational autonomy. Its mission was to empower village communities to manage their collective assets, improve governance, and build resilience from the ground up.
Community-driven development in China has often fallen short of its goals. While projects boosted rural public investment, they did not improve poor households’ income or consumption. Scholars point to poor inter-ministerial coordination and local officials’ tendency to bend national directives to serve local interests. What’s more, most studies have focused on provincial and national levels — leaving the political dynamics at the county and village levels underexamined. C’s story sheds light on this missing layer.
While community-driven development in China boosted public investment in rural areas, poor households saw no improvement in income
With foreign donor support and backing from a local government office, C ran a pilot scheme in Sichuan in the early 2000s. It was a slow, under-the-radar process — experimenting with participatory methods in a context where quick, quantifiable results were prized.
Everything changed in 2008. A devastating earthquake hit Sichuan, killing tens of thousands and destroying much of the region’s rural infrastructure. C joined the relief efforts — but also saw a strategic opening. The earthquake, while not poverty-related per se, created space to frame reconstruction as a development challenge.
In conversations with villagers and local cadres, C identified a growing local interest in tourism as a way to recover livelihoods. C didn’t impose this direction. It created the idea with local stakeholders — combining its principles of participatory governance with the community’s aspirations for economic revival.
A government-organised NGO identified growing local interest in tourism as a way to recover livelihoods
This post-disaster experimentation laid the groundwork for what later became Britevilla. A study trip to South Korea’s Saemaul Undong movement in 2012 helped C refine its thinking: it could integrate village beautification, cooperative management, and tourism into a scalable model.
A second breakthrough came in 2013, when an international donor began funding C’s work. The donor’s focus on aesthetics, ecology, and rural branding fit neatly with the emerging model. Meanwhile, a 2010 central policy reform had expanded fiscal autonomy for counties — making local governments more open to collaboration with credible outside actors like C.
The decisive moment arrived in 2015. That year, the Chinese government issued its Decision on Winning the Tough Battle Against Poverty, formally establishing Targeted Poverty Alleviation (TPA) as the national strategy. Xi Jinping’s Beautiful Village concept, earlier floated in speeches, was now codified into actionable policy. For local cadres, that meant these ideas were no longer optional: they were politically necessary.
C’s model, tested on the ground and backed by donor and community support, now matched national objectives. C launched a new pilot in Hebei under the formal TPA framework. This time, Britevilla had political endorsement, administrative capacity, and funding alignment — and it succeeded. The project scaled across provinces, becoming a recognised model in the poverty policy toolkit of local policy actors.
The rise of Britevilla highlights three key lessons about how community-based models can gain policy traction in a top-down system like China’s:
In authoritarian systems, policy windows are often assumed to open only when regime survival is at stake. But natural disasters offer a relatively neutral (though not entirely apolitical) and emotionally charged opportunity for cooperation. C didn’t treat the earthquake as the core problem. Instead, it used the moment to introduce its previously stalled community-driven solutions. Disasters thus became platforms to reframe unrelated agendas as urgent and fundable.
Leadership speeches may signal intent, but in China, it’s the formal adoption of strategies, backed by performance evaluations, that drives implementation. C’s model aligned with Xi’s 2013 Beautiful Village rhetoric, but it wasn’t until the 2015 national strategy mandated targeted poverty alleviation that things moved. Formalisation doesn’t just validate ideas; it activates the bureaucratic machinery that turns vision into policy.
Britevilla succeeded not just because it worked, but because C was unusually well positioned to make it work. As a semi-autonomous GONGO, C had access to decision-makers, international donors, and credible local partners. Its hybrid status gave it political safety and legitimacy — a structural advantage grassroots actors lack. In authoritarian contexts, even the best solutions need institutional proximity to stand a chance.
Britevilla’s story is deeply rooted in China’s unique political environment, but its lessons travel. In any system where policymaking is hierarchical or risk-averse, policy entrepreneurs face a familiar quandary: how to gain traction without confrontation.
Change often comes not through overt influence, but through strategic alignment and quiet persistence
C’s success shows that change often comes not through overt influence, but through strategic alignment and quiet persistence — by aligning solutions with shifting windows, building trust over time, and knowing when to act. Whether you’re working in Beijing, Brasília, or Brussels, policy entrepreneurship is often about patience, timing, and the quiet skill of fitting ideas into the cracks where power doesn’t yet know it needs them.
* To protect confidentiality, 'Organisation C' and 'Britevilla' are pseudonyms. This precautionary approach, informed by prior research experience, minimises potential risks and supports the article's long-term accessibility.
