Exploration of ways to improve the subjective welfare of residents is an important area of current academic research.  Using data from the China Family Panel Studies survey conducted in 2010, this paper investigated the impact of clan culture on the mental health of elderly people in rural China.  The results demonstrated that clan culture can significantly decrease the depression score of the rural elderly.  Further, there was no gender difference with respect to the impact of clan culture on the depression score of the elderly.  At the same time, the positive effects of clan culture on the depression score of the elderly have gradually weakened with economic development.  Exploration of the mechanisms involved indicated that in areas with stronger clan culture, older people receive more social support.  This study enriches our understanding of the impact of informal institutions on the welfare of rural residents.  At the same time, it can also provide a certain decision-making reference for the government to formulate relative poverty relief strategies in a new stage of poverty alleviation.

This paper focused on the intergenerational transmission of poverty in rural China by estimating the intergenerational transmission of earnings and stated its mechanism from the perspective of human capital investment before children participated in the labor market.  The data used in this study were longitude data collected in 2 000 households of 100 villages among 25 counties across five provinces in 2005, 2008, 2012, 2016, and 2019.  Qualitative and quantitative methods were adopted.  We found a significant intergenerational transmission of earnings in rural China, especially for the pairs of father–children and parents–children.  The intergenerational earnings’ elasticities were much less than those in urban areas, which indicated better social mobility in rural areas than that in urban China.  The children with parents who could earn much were more likely to be invested before they participated in the labor market, gain a high education and have more skills.  Three cases further showed that the mechanism of human capital investment in children breaking the intergenerational transmission of poverty and promoting social mobility.

Two phenomena in the history of China’s economic growth during the last four decades are the increase in the share of off-farm employment and the progress in poverty alleviation in rural China.  Although both of them have been well documented in the literature, less is known about the linkage between the two.  To better understand the role that off-farm employment has played in poverty alleviation in rural China is critically important not only for China but also for those countries that are trying to reduce poverty.  Here, we examine the impact of off-farm employment on poverty alleviation in rural China.  Using the data from two nationally representative household panel surveys (China National Rural Survey and China Rural Development Survey), this paper provides supporting evidence that off-farm employment contributes to poverty alleviation in rural China.  Specifically, if household participation in off-farm employment increases by 10 percentage points, the likelihood for a non-poor household to fall into poverty will decrease by 0.88 percentage point whereas the likelihood for a poor household to climb out of poverty will increase by 3.5 percentage points.  In a word, off-employment can not only prevent rural residents to fall into poverty but also help those already in poverty climb out of it.