Anti-poverty campaign goal within sight

China has lifted more than 68 million people out of poverty over the past five years and is determined to help another 30 million rise from destitution before the end of 2020, Xinhua News Agency reported.

In all, 68.53 million people, two-thirds of impoverished Chinese, have said goodbye to their straitened circumstances since late 2012, when the Communist Party of China opened its 18th National Congress and Xi Jinping was elected top leader, said Liu Yongfu, head of the State Council Leading Group Office of Poverty Alleviation and Development, Xinhua reported on Sunday.

These past five years saw the greatest achievements in China’s poverty alleviation, Liu said, adding that decisive progress has been made.

In the coming three years, the central government will strive to assist nearly 30 million people to leave destitution behind, Liu said. The difficult parts of this campaign lie in regions inhabited mainly by ethnic minority groups, he said, because the causes of poverty there are sophisticated and harder to uproot.

Five provincial-level regions have more than 3 million impoverished residents, according to Liu’s office, and in nearly 30,000 villages at least 20 percent of the population remains poor.

This year, he said, the government will reduce the number of impoverished Chinese by at least 10 million.