BEIJING: The national rural poverty population in China decreased by 23 million, 16 million and 12.32 million from 2012 to 2014, a senior poverty alleviation official disclosed on the sideline of the two sessions early this week.
During an online discussion show with the People’s Daily on March 9, Liu Yongfu, director of the State Council Leading Group Office of Poverty Alleviation and Development, looked back the achievements that his office had seen in bringing people out of poverty. Liu explained that poverty alleviation is one of the most difficult tasks in the pursuit of a comprehensively well-off society. He added that there are still 14 Contiguous Destitute Areas spanning the borders of multiple provinces, as well as 592 poor counties, 128,000 poverty-stricken villages and around 70 million people living in poverty. Around 12 million households are taking care of ill people at home, and over 6 million live in unsafe structures.
In 2014, around 430,000 officials from the four levels of government, namely province, city, county and township, founded 125,000 work teams to aid poor villages. “We have made a good start with our focused poverty alleviation work,” said Liu. Last year, the central government allocated 7 percent of its anti-poverty fund to county-level issues, and also granted county-level governments the ability to approve poverty alleviation projects.
Liu added, “We still have about 70 million people living in poverty. Poverty is a weakness we must deal with. Although it is a difficult task, we still want to reduce the numbers of people living in rural poverty by over 10 million within the next year. We are confident that we can achieve this challenging goal and we will keep working hard.” (People’s Daily)
