The Final Race Against Extreme Poverty

UPON completing the poverty eradication task at the end of this year, China will achieve the poverty alleviation goal set in the United Nations 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development 10 years ahead of schedule, which is of great significance to both China and the world. “No country in the world has ever lifted so many people out of poverty in such a short period of time,” Chinese President Xi Jinping said on March 6 at a symposium on winning the tough battle against poverty.

- LU RUCAI

In the interests of epidemic prevention and control, the symposium was held in the form of a teleconference. Participants included officials from provinces, autonomous regions, and municipalities throughout the country, as well as county-level leaders in 22 provinces in the central and western regions facing particularly challenging poverty alleviation tasks.

This meeting took place less than 300 days before the deadline for the completion of poverty eradication, at a time when about 5.51 million people in 2,707 impoverished villages in 52 counties remained mired in poverty. The final part of the poverty eradication fight is particularly challenging.

How Difficult?

Poverty reduction has been an important task of the Chinese government since the country implemented the policy of reform and opening-up in the late 1970s. There were, according to prevailing standards, 98.99 million rural poor at the end of 2012, prior to which China had successfully lifted approximately 700 million people out of absolute poverty. In 2015, China specified the task of eliminating rural poverty and rehabilitating all impoverished counties by 2020.

To fundamentally solve the poverty problem, in 2012, the State Council Leading Group Office of Poverty Alleviation and Development explicitly identified 832 poor counties. At the end of last February, 52 of these 832 impoverished counties had not risen from poverty.

The 52 impoverished counties are distributed over seven provinces and autonomous regions, including Guangxi, Sichuan, Guizhou, Yunnan, Gansu, Ningxia, and Xinjiang, all of which are located in remote, often inaccessible areas of western China. Many of these places are ethnic minority areas where standards of education are low, so communication is often problematic.