China to increase funding for poverty alleviation

The Chinese government will allocate more funds to keep pace with the needs of poverty relief in the coming five years, according to a white paper issued Monday.

The central government will continue to increase transfer payments to impoverished areas and ensure substantial growth in its funding for poverty alleviation, said the white paper titled "China's Progress in Poverty Reduction and Human Rights".

Investments within the central budget will be tilted in support of the poor, the white paper said.

To fight poverty, the government assigned special poverty relief funds amounting to 189.84 billion yuan (about 28.17 billion U.S. dollars) from 2011 to 2015, with an average annual growth rate of 14.5 percent.

By the end of 2015, China still had 55.75 million people living in poverty. It plans to lift all of its poor out of poverty by 2020.

Over the past 30 years since the launch of the reform and opening up drive, more than 700 million Chinese people have been lifted from poverty.

According to the UN Millennium Development Goals Report 2015, the proportion of people living in extreme poverty in China fell from 61 percent in 1990 to 4.2 percent in 2014, with the number of people China has raised from poverty accounting for 70 percent of the world's total. Endi