The invisibility characteristic of rural poverty space: A case study of Lianzhou
隐藏性乡村贫困空间探析——以广东省连州市为例

Many scholars believe that a principal characteristic of rural poverty is its invisibility in developed countries——which means that the truth of the poverty is hidden by the status of countryside development based on the average statistical data.Taking Lianzhou city at county-level as a research area,this paper discusses the spatial manifestation of rural poverty and its invisibility characteristic.This paper uses two methods to examine the rural poverty space.The first one is using the average statistical data and quantity chart analysis method;the second one is using impoverished people data and the poverty incidence method.And then,it compares the two results.The conclusion shows that the spatial differentiation of economic development based on the average statistical data cannot reflect the spatial differentiation of poverty population truly,in other words,the aggregated official statistics,based on average levels of income and expenditure,disguise the presence of poverty within the county.Such findings have relationship with the development background of this research area and also provide some useful information to the recent local poverty elimination practices.Thus we should consider both of the average statistical data and the poverty population to confirm the reality of rural poverty in order to improve the pertinence and effectiveness of the poverty alleviation.