The debate over the scale and trend of poverty in China has been raging for some time. Some authors claim its record of poverty reduction has been even greater than official statistics show. Others maintain the official data grossly understate rural poverty but overstate the rate of poverty reduction since the late 1970s. Still others stress that lack of data on urban poverty, which has been rising since the mid-1990s, badly distorts the country’s overall poverty picture. Considering that nearly one in four of the world’s people lives in China, this controversy is of great consequence when assessing global poverty — including whether the world is on track for meeting the first millennium development goal by 2015. (...)