China has reduced poor population by more than two-thirds over the past five years, a senior poverty alleviation official said Friday.
“There were 98.99 million Chinese living below the national poverty line at the end of 2012. At the end of 2017, the number was reduced to around 30 million. That means that China lifted more than 66 million people out of poverty over the past five years, reducing the poor population by over two thirds. We are closer to the goal of eradicating absolute poverty,” Liu Yongfu, director of the State Council Leading Group Office of Poverty Alleviation and Development, said at a press conference in Beijing.
According to Liu, China has been trying to reduce poverty by developing industries, tourism and E-commerce, and building photovoltaic projects.
The country has also improved the ecology and environment in the poverty-stricken areas by restoring the ecology, relocating people from inhospitable areas and returning land reclaimed from forests.
Liu said China will continue the poverty reduction work steadfastly according to the basic principles of precision poverty relief. It will persist in the centralized unified arrangements and the provincial and county level responsibility system and mechanism and uphold the prescribed standards and goals for poverty relief in the entire country.
China is aiming to eliminate absolute poverty by 2020 in a bid to create a “moderately prosperous society.
