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In 2020, China announced that it had lifted all rural residents living below the current poverty line out of poverty and built a moderately prosperous society in all respects. However, relative poverty characterized by a development gap still exists, and tackling relative poverty by reducing inequality and narrowing rural-urban disparities has great theoretical and practical significance for pushing integrated urban-rural development and achieving common prosperity in China. This study explored how regional differences and inequality affected the construction of the weakly relative poverty line, measured and compared relative poverty conditions with different poverty standards in different regional levels in China, chose a framework to construct a relative poverty standard suitable for China ’s nation‑ al condition, and finally carried out the Shapley decomposition and Fairlie decomposition on the formation of rural-urban disparities of relative poverty. The study found that relative poverty was highly related to inequality but was eventually determined by the specific pat‑ tern of regional income distribution. The problem of unbalanced development among regions had a significant impact on the specification of the poverty line and the distribution of relative poverty. The occurrence of relative poverty and the degree of inequality in rural areas were much higher than those in urban areas, whatever relative poverty line was used, and rural areas would still be the center of poverty reduction. Income, types of work, quality of life, education, and differences between provinces were the main reasons for the formation of rural-urban disparities in relative poverty, among which income and work together accounted for 49.88% of the reasons and quality of life and education accounted for 10.41% and 9.28%, respectively. However, compared with relative poverty in rural areas, in‑ come distribution and living costs were the disadvantages of relative poverty in urban areas. Therefore, in the context of accelerating integrated urban-rural development and promoting common prosperity, the formulation of a relatively uniform relative poverty standard should be considered the main strategy for poverty identification in China in the future. In addition, relevant policies need to be formulated to address the development imbalance at both individual and regional levels in order to carry out the governance of relative poverty issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]