By He Yin
Chinese President Xi Jinping announced on Feb. 25 that the country has achieved a “complete victory” in its fight against poverty, with the final 98.99 million impoverished rural residents living under the current poverty line all lifted out of poverty, and all its 832 poverty-stricken counties and 128,000 poor villages removed from the poverty list.
China has eradicated regional poverty and accomplished the arduous task of eliminating absolute poverty, creating another “miracle” that will “go down in history,” Xi said at a gathering held in Beijing to mark the country’s accomplishments in poverty alleviation and honor its model poverty fighters.
The remarkable achievements of China in reducing poverty marked a new chapter in the history of mankind’s fight against poverty and opened up new horizon for the development of human society.
China’s poverty alleviation campaign is an important force driving the global poverty reduction process, and the Chinese history is indeed a history of how the Chinese nation has fought against poverty.
Under current standards, China has freed 770 million impoverished rural residents from poverty since it started implementing the reform and opening-up policy in 1978.
According to the World Bank’s international poverty line, the county is responsible for over 70 percent of the global reduction in poverty since late 1970s.
When poverty alleviation remains a daunting challenge across the world and the gap between the rich and the poor continues to widen in some countries, China has met the poverty eradication target set in the United Nations’2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development 10 years ahead of schedule, winning widespread praise from the international community.
It is globally recognized that China’s performance over the last four decades in raising hundreds of millions people out of poverty is “an unparalleled success”, said Guy Ryder, Director-General of the International Labour Organization.
China’s experience in reducing poverty has served as a useful reference for the efforts of various countries to realize their poverty reduction goals.
Based on its national conditions and following the law of poverty reduction, China adopted a series of unconventional policies and measures and established a whole set of policy, work and institutional systems, blazing a poverty reduction path and forming anti-poverty theories with Chinese characteristics.
The poverty reduction process in China has fully demonstrated the original aspiration and mission of the Communist Party of China (CPC) to put people first and always work for the well-being of the Chinese people, the Party’s successful practices in blazing a poverty reduction path with Chinese characteristics based on the country’s national conditions, as well as the sense of responsibility of the Party to contribute more to humanity and build a better world.
China’s successful experience in fighting poverty is valuable, and its practices should be brought to Laos, said Bounnhang Vorachith, General Secretary of the Lao People’s Revolutionary Party (LPRP) Central Committee and President of Laos, after seeing with his own eyes how China was reducing poverty during his field visits to once-impoverished villages in central China’s Hunan province and east China’s Fujian province.
While fighting poverty at home, China has injected confidence and strength into the poverty alleviation cause of the entire humanity.
The country has been an important promoter of global poverty reduction undertakings. It has actively carried out global cooperation on poverty reduction to perform international responsibilities for poverty alleviation and try its best to help other developing countries fight poverty.
China has helped reduce poverty and improve people’s livelihood in other developing countries by aiding them in constructing rural public welfare facilities, sharing experiences of agriculture management, and promoting technology transfer.
It has offered help to more than 120 developing countries in the implementation of the United Nations (UN) Millennium Development Goals.
According to a research report of the World Bank, the China-proposed Belt and Belt Initiative could help lift 7.6 million people in participating countries out of extreme poverty and 32 million people in relevant countries out of moderate poverty if the initiative should be implemented fully.
China has pursued win-win cooperation and common development in developing bilateral ties with other developing countries including those in Africa, which is the country’s another contribution to the global cause of poverty reduction, noted UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres.
No country in the world has been able to lift hundreds of millions of people out of poverty in such a short time, Xi said while addressing the recent gathering held in Beijing.
The result belongs to China as well as the world, Xi said, stressing that by achieving the result, China has contributed its strength to the building of a community with a shared future for mankind.
Standing at a new starting point, China is about to embark on a new journey. It’s believed that the country will continue promoting the realization of common prosperity for everyone while making unremitting efforts with the international community to jointly build a community with a shared future for mankind that features common development and is free from poverty.
