Abstract: The Government divided poor areas in China into 14 contiguous extreme poor regions in “China Rural Poverty Alleviation and Development Program(2011-2020)”, aiming to break the limitations of the previous point poverty alleviation with regional restrictions. However, the poverty reduction industry has some limitations in those poor administrative regions because of the lack of collaborations among regions. This paper reviewed the history of the poverty reduction in China and proposed a new way to alleviate poverty problems in China—creating inter-regional poverty reduction industrial zones. Based on the characteristics of the resources in these contiguous poor regions, these zones can improve the efficiency of resource allocation and poverty reduction effects through breaking down the regional boundaries, achieving a unified allocation of resources, and utilizing the economy of scales. However, creating inter-regional poverty reduction industrial zones faces a series of challenges and problems, too, including 1) no commonly accepted definition of the industrial zones; 2) missing systematic coordination and different function assignments among regions; 3) uneven industrial development within regions; and 4) different local funds supporting standards and policies. Therefore, to promote the creation of the cross-regional industrial zones for poverty alleviation, this paper provides the following suggestions: 1) taking these cross-regional industrial zones as one single project to manage; 2) exploring an integrated development model; 3) combining general supportive policies and special preferential policies together; and 4) encouraging the innovations in developing poverty alleviation model.