Towards precise rural governance: How cadre deployment strategies shape resource delivery and poverty alleviation outcomes in rural China

This paper investigates how public policy resources are transmitted through a precise institutional setting in “Pairing-up” Support System (PSS) of the Chinese Targeted Poverty Alleviation (TPA) scheme. Drawing on Knoepfel's (2018) public policy resource framework, the capability approach to multidimensional poverty and emerging debates on rural party-statecraft, it conceptualises “precision of resource delivery channels” along three institutional dimensions – information granularity, tailoring capacity, and supervision and accountability – to analyse how the organisational design of the PSS transmits resource stocks into effective household-level services. By the case of county Z in Western China, the paper reveals that introducing a more precise home-visited support better addresses multidimensional poverty. Although the two support modes demonstrate no significant difference for income poverty reduction, the village-stationed support is more effective for income improvement when led by higher-ranking cadres. Furthermore, a better match between cadre resources and household needs in the village-stationed support paradoxically increases inter-village income inequality, revealing a structural tension between technical precision in resource allocation and equity of resource conversion across villages with unequal governance capacities. The study calls for targeted state intervention to prevent household relapse into poverty and to promote sustainable rural development during the rural revitalisation phase.