Over the past 40 years of reform and opening up, China has always adhered to economic construction as the center, achieved long-term and high-speed economic growth. People’s lives have undergone tremendous changes. From 1978 to 2017, the number of employed people in China increased by nearly 10 million annually, and a large amount of surplus rural labor force was transferred to non-agricultural industries with high efficiency and high income. Per capita disposable income rose from 171 yuan to 25,974 yuan, representing an average annual growth rate of 8.5 percent. In the past 40 years, the Chinese people have moved from a life of insufficient food and clothing to an all-round well-off life. According to the 2010 standard, 740 million people in China’s rural areas have been lifted out of absolute poverty, and the poverty incidence rate has dropped significantly from 97.5% to 3.1%, contributing over 70% to global poverty reduction and creating a miracle in the history of human poverty reduction. Over the past 40 years, China has made remarkable achievements in large-scale poverty reduction, laying a solid foundation for targeted poverty alleviation in recent years and building a moderately prosperous society in all respects by 2020.Based on cross-border or country-specific studies of a large number of literature, though it is proved that economic growth is the most powerful means of reducing poverty and improving quality of life （Bourguignon, 2004; Rodrik, 2007; Department for International Development, 2008; Bhagwati and Panagariya, 2013）, different developing countries have different national conditions, development modes and poverty patterns, and the correlation between economic growth and poverty reduction is also significantly different: even if the economic growth rates of the two countries are the same, the poverty reduction effect may be different due to the difference in the participation of the poverty-stricken population involved in the growth process and distribution of growth. This calls for an in-depth study of how the people of a country are involved in the process of long-term economic growth and distribution in the process of economic growth and poverty reduction in various countries.In accordance with the above ideas and in the face of China’s large-scale poverty reduction achievements since the reform and opening up, the concern of this paper is: how to understand the mechanism between China’s long-term economic growth and large-scale poverty reduction? According to the theory of economic development, industrialization refers to a series of changes in economic, industrial, regional, employment and ownership structure caused by the development of industrial sector in an economy. This paper holds that the reason for the long-term structural changes caused by China’s industrialization and the profound changes in the people’s way of production and life can be explained from the perspective of Chinese people’s participation in the process of industrialization, which constructs an institutional explanation between economic growth and large-scale poverty reduction. Starting from the phased changes of China’s industrialization, it is also possible to explore the direction of further implementation of the targeted poverty reduction for the purpose of understanding China’s shift from high-speed economic growth to high-quality development. Furthermore, the experience of refining China’s large-scale poverty reduction from a long-term perspective can also be useful for developing long-term economic development and poverty reduction strategies for other developing countries.