General Secretary Xi Jinping has stressed on many occasions that we must grasp the key tasks of poverty alleviation in a timely and accurate manner, adhere to targeted poverty alleviation, reverse the schedule of work, properly calculate the detailed accounts, and never allow any ethnic minority or region to fall behind.As one of the key subjects of targeted poverty alleviation, will there be any changes in ethnic relations during the active or passive poverty alleviation process of ethnic minorities?What changes have taken place? By means of field investigation, typical cases of targeted poverty alleviation in ethnic areas are analyzed to explore the impact of targeted poverty alleviation on ethnic relations in Southwest China. The study found that targeted poverty alleviation had a good mainstream impact on ethnic relations in Southwest China, but it was difficult to eliminate discrimination psychology in the short term, the loss of ethnic culture and the impact of elite capture and other potential influence to ethnic relations.