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China pledges resolute measures to root out poverty by 2020

Xinhua, November 28, 2015 Adjust font size:

China's top leadership on Saturday pledged resolute measures to help the remaining 70 million poor people shake off poverty and enjoy essential social services by 2020.

Major tasks for governments over the next five years will include ensuring the poverty-stricken people to have enough to eat and wear, and to enjoy compulsory education, health service and housing, according to a two-day high-profile conference on poverty alleviation and development, which ended Saturday in Beijing.

Identifying poverty alleviation still "an arduous task," President Xi Jinping told the conference that "no single poor region nor an individual living in poverty will be left behind" when the country accomplishes the goal of "building a moderately prosperous society" by 2020.

Xi urged governments at all levels to carry out more targeted and precise measures to ensure the poor people in rural areas have access to food, clothes, basic education, medical care, and safe home.

Local governments and officials, particularly those of underdeveloped regions, should make poverty alleviation the top priority in the next five years' work, Xi demanded.

Priority should be given to the improvement of rural infrastructure, including roads, access to water, power and Internet, Premier Li Keqiang said during the conference.

Over the past three decades some 700 million rural residents across China shook off poverty. China was the first developing country to meet the Millennium Development Goals target of reducing the population living in poverty by half ahead of the 2015 deadline.

At the end of last year, China still had 70.17 million people in the countryside living below its poverty line of 2,300 yuan (376 U.S. dollars) in annual income by 2010 price standards.

The conference was attended by senior leaders of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee and the central government, and major provincial-level officials. It was the first such high-level meeting held after the Fifth Plenum of 18th CPC Central Committee, which had promised to root out poverty by 2020. Endit