China strives to meet prosperity deadline

Our Correspondent

Beijing

Rinqen Tongdru, Party chief of a remote county on the eastern margin of the Qinghai-Tibet plateau, is looking forward to the important political meeting next month.
Rinqen will be among the 2,980 national lawmakers at the annual legislative session, during which the issue he cares about the most – poverty alleviation – should be a highlight, as the country is closing in on its goal of becoming a moderately prosperous society in 2020.
For years, many farmers and herders in Rinqen’s hometown in Debo County, Gansu Province, have lived tough lives in the mountainous area.
The poverty alleviation campaign has compiled profiles of poor villagers since 2013. “We try to understand the particular conditions of individuals, and make plans accordingly,” Rinqen Tongdru said.
“For example, we found one village where it was easy to grow the cash crop angelica, so the government grew some and that encouraged the farmers to grow it, who were then offered loans and training,” he said.
A total of 11,334 rural people have made the step up out of poverty in Rinqen Tongdru’s county, lowering the poverty rate from over 34 percent to 6 percent.
“There are still over 2,000 people to go. Helping them within three years is a task for the whole county,” Rinqen Tongdru said. He will discuss the issue with deputies from other rural regions at the upcoming session, learning what he can.
Lifting all people out of poverty is the baseline of the endeavor. A total of 68.53 million rural people over the past five years have seen their fortunes transformed, with the national poverty rate falling from 10.2 percent to 3.1 percent.
This year alone, China will lift 10 million people out of absolute poverty, including 2.8 million who will be relocated.
“China’s remarkable progress in reducing extreme poverty has significantly contributed to the decline in global poverty,” noted Hoon S. Soh, World Bank Program Leader for economic policy for China.
“Poverty alleviation embodies the Chinese approach to human rights,” said Chen Fengying, a research fellow at the China Institute of Contemporary International Relations.
There has been a major impact on the distribution of national income, said Chen, noting that the ultimate goal of poverty alleviation is to avoid the middle-income trap.
Besides rooting out poverty, other key tasks include doubling GDP and per-capita income from 2010 levels.
After decades of development, a large middle-income population has emerged in China, perhaps the biggest in the world, giving rise to a vast domestic market.
As the world’s largest source of outbound tourists, Chinese people made over 131 million overseas trips last year. As a top market for products such as automobiles and clothes, China saw its imports volume surge 18.7 percent in 2017. In November, the China International Import Expo in Shanghai is expected to attract thousands of enterprises from more than 100 countries.

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