Effective poverty governance is a worldwide challenge,and the advent of the"VUCA era"has further increased the uncertainty and difficulty of addressing poverty.In the new journey of comprehensively promoting the building of a powerful nation through Chinese-style modernization,some emerging poverty issues,such as temporary poverty,are increasingly becoming significant obstacles to improving people's livelihood and well-being.Based on interview data and temporary assistance policy documents,this paper conducts a qualitative analysis of the generative mechanism of temporary poverty,using families as the unit of analysis,and summarizes this mechanism as a progressive differentiation mechanism.The constituent elements and operational logic of this mechanism are as follows:First,the core elements are divided into two categories:those external to the family system and those within the family system;Second,two rounds of interactions and progressive differentiations among different elements within the family system lead to the formation of temporarily poor families.Specifically,the initial differentiation manifests as the failure of family resilience to withstand risk shocks and the emergence of family crises;the secondary differentiation manifests as the ineffectiveness of new conventional support in intervening in family crises and the subsequent formation of temporarily poor families.The exploration of the generative mechanism of temporarily poor families in this paper not only helps deepen our understanding of temporary poverty but also provides policy references for preventing and addressing temporary poverty.