The struggle against poverty is directly linked to saving rural people. Ethiopia and China have been implementing rural development policies and strategies to lead millions of rural poor out of poverty. The study investigates Ethiopia's and China's rural development policies since the major rural reform periods. The author utilizes data from World Bank (WB) and Food Association Organization (FAO) to scrutinize the consequence of rural development policies towards rural poverty eradication in China and Ethiopia. The paper also describes the literature and based on the data, a series of normative analyses examine the interaction among rural development policy, rural people, and poverty in both nations. The finding of our study strongly urges that the remarkable achievements of China in the huge reduction of rural poverty is basically due to the post-reform commitment of the Communist Party of China towards target-specific, research-based, achievement-oriented and pro-poor rural development policy and implementation. Ethiopia needs to develop and implement bottom-up demand based, top-down incentive oriented, target-specific, research based and pro-poor rural reform strategies to lead millions of rural people from multi-causal poverty. Formulating and implementing target specific, researchbased, achievement-oriented and pro-poor rural development policies and strategies could play a substantial role to eradicate rural poverty in developing countries.