Beijing: President Xi Jinping declared Thursday that China has scored a ‘complete victory’ in its fight against poverty. Xi Jinping said that over 770 million people have been lifted out of poverty in the last four decades. He called it another ‘miracle’ created by China that will go down in history.
Absolute poverty has been eradicated in the world’s most populous country, Xi announced. He was addressing a gathering held here to mark China’s accomplishments in poverty alleviation and honour its model poverty fighters.
China has a population of around 1.4 billion. “No country has been able to lift hundreds of millions of people out of poverty in such a short time,” Xi said.
Xi informed that all poor people in rural areas have been lifted out of poverty. With this, China has achieved the UN goal of poverty eradication 10 years ahead of the 2030 deadline, he informed.
Over the past eight years, the final 98.99 million impoverished rural residents living under the current poverty line have all been lifted out of poverty. All the 832 impoverished counties and 128,000 impoverished villages have been removed from the poverty list, Xi asserted.
China has contributed to more than 70 per cent of global poverty reduction over the same period, Xi, also General Secretary of the ruling Communist Party of China (CPC), said. With such achievements, China has created another ‘miracle’ that will ‘go down in history’, he said.
Xi said since he assumed power, China has invested accumulative fiscal funds of nearly 1.6 trillion yuan (about USD 246 billion) into poverty alleviation over the past eight years. He said according to the World Bank’s international poverty line, the number of Chinese people lifted out of poverty over the past 40 years accounts for more than 70 per cent of the global total.
China considers extreme rural poor are those with annual per capita income of less than USD 620, or about USD 1.69 a day at current exchange rates, which compared closely with the World Bank’s minimum standard of USD 1.90 a day.
Complete eradication of poverty in China was the main goal announced by Xi when he came to power towards the end of 2012. At that time, China had about 100 million poor people, mostly living in remote areas.