Breaking the culture of passivity: the localization of international poverty reduction norms in China’s poor counties in the context of the BRI

To date, the BRI has prioritized addressing poverty. By promoting local special industries, China’s impoverished counties have begun to leverage the BRI economic opportunities. Through the BRI, China has reframed international poverty norms, localizing them to reinforce legitimacy. However, research on the localization of international norms has focused mainly on the general patterns, while neglecting local specific contexts. To analyze how international poverty reduction norms are localized in impoverished regions under the BRI framework, this study proposes two mechanisms: industrial embedding and identity resilience. The study first argues that the local industrial development models under China’s anti-poverty strategy and the BRI create felicity conditions for the implementation of international anti-poverty norms. Second, rural elites, as promoters of rural characteristic industries, bridge the psychic distance between international projects and impoverished populations through the identity and experience advantages, with new-type professional farmers driving the ‘evolutionary’ localization.