Xi Jinping stressed difficulty and urgency of poverty alleviation

Beijing. February 16. Silkroadnews - Chinese President Xi Jinping has stressed the difficulties of combating poverty and urgent need to solve problems in poverty alleviation, the newspaper “People’s Daily” reports.
Poverty alleviation is of great importance for building a moderately prosperous society in all respects and achieving the first centenary goal, Xi Jinping said, stressing quality of poverty reduction work with a focus on areas in deep poverty.
At a symposium on poverty alleviation in Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan Province, Xi listened to the local officials’ reports on poverty-stricken western and southern regions of China and discussed with them the poverty alleviation issues.
According to Xi, the decisive progress has been made since China has made unprecedented efforts to combat poverty under the leadership of the Communist Party with targeted strategies implemented, strong financial support provided and strict requirements set to eradicate poverty.
Xi also highlighted the challenges and difficulties in this struggle, as the country still needs to lift more than 30 million people out of poverty in the next three years.
He named a number of undesirable practices hampering the work, among them formalities, bureaucracy, falsification.
China aims to eliminate absolute poverty by 2020 as a part of creation of a moderately prosperous society. The poverty rate in the country has dropped from 10.2% in 2012 to 3.1% in 2017 after 68.53 million people were lifted out of poverty over the past five years.