Poverty alleviation is a key to build a well- off society in an all- round way. At present, the researches on rural poverty mainly concentrate on western underdeveloped areas and poverty- stricken areas of China, while less attention has been paid to poverty in economically developed areas. The poverty alleviation ability of poor villages in economically developed areas has a direct impact on the effectiveness of poverty alleviation. The research on the potential of poverty alleviation in relatively poor villages of developed provinces is helpful in ensuring the smooth completion of the task of poverty alleviation. This paper takes Lianzhou City, a less developed city in the northern Guangdong Province as an example. Based on the analysis of the basic characteristics of 66 relatively poor villages at the village scale, an evaluation system of poverty reduction potential was built, and AHP and EVM were used to determine the weight of evaluation factors. Then, the weighted summation method was used to evaluate the poverty alleviation potential of 66 relatively poor villages in Lianzhou, and the restriction factor score of poverty alleviation was used to divide the poverty alleviation potential into different types. The results showed that: 1) The relatively poor villages in Lianzhou are clustered in space, and they generally have poor natural conditions, weak economic foundation and scarce arable land and are more influenced by policy constraints. 2) The evaluation system of poverty alleviation potential consists of 22 factors in five dimensions including natural location, resource condition, economic factor, social security and infrastructure condition, among which the six factors in economic factor and infrastructure condition take the greatest weights and they are the proportion of rural tourism, the proportion of the poverty- stricken households in the specialty cooperative, poverty head count ratio, whether there are passenger trains pass the administrative village, the proportion of broadband households and the disposable income of poor households. 3) The poverty reduction potential were divided into five grades. The result shows 65.15% of the relatively poor villages have medium above potential to get rid of poverty, which means that the relatively poor villages in Lianzhou have great potential to get rid of poverty. 4) In the classification of poverty alleviation potential, villages in the priority type account for 16.67%, in the steady type account for 28.79%, and in the key assistance type account for 54.54%. The result of the research will provide a scientific and effective guidance for the local government to work out an accurate poverty reduction strategy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]