Abstract: As an important policy tool, social assistance has played a positive role in promoting the national poverty alleviation strategy. After achieving the goal of building a well-off society in an all-round way and historically eliminating absolute poverty in rural areas, China's society has entered a new development stage of building a socialist modern country in an all-round way, and China's poverty reduction governance has entered a new period of solving relative poverty from getting rid of absolute poverty. This paper holds that if social assistance is to effectively play an important role in the governance of relative poverty in the new stage, it should surpass the concept and practice of current social assistance, and make target adjustment and improvement for the institutional shortcomings that the current social assistance system does not meet the requirements of relative poverty governance. Therefore, this paper analyzes the goal turn of social assistance against poverty, and puts forward the goal orientation of social assistance to meet the needs of relative poverty governance from the directions of assistance drive, assistance function, assistance mode and assistance operation mechanism. Then, from the fields of social assistance such as empowerment, development promotion, poverty prevention, service innovation and expansion, and governance efficiency enhancement, this paper analyzes the improvement measures of how China's social assistance system can actively respond to the demand of relative poverty governance under the goal turn of poverty governance.

Key words: social assistance, new development stage, relative poverty, sustainable development, anti-poverty path