Giving Poverty the Boot

China’s poverty alleviation campaign achieves success with all registered counties stepping out of absolute poverty

- Hu Fan

Wang Peng remains busy in his last month serving as a temporary official in Lichang, a village in Zuoquan County, Shanxi Province in north China. Apart from his routine of collecting and checking data about the village’s poverty alleviation work, he is coordinating several programs aimed at increasing income for the villagers.

Wang was sent to the village in 2018 by China International Publishing Group (CIPG) based in Beijing. Since 2002, CIPG has sent its employees to the impoverished county for hands-on participation in the poverty alleviation drive of the country. Wang was part of a three-person team of colleagues assigned to different areas of the county, with Lichang Village being the focus of their mission. Their term of service was two years, but was extended by another six months to the end of 2020, the deadline for all the poor counties in China like Zuoquan to be lifted out of poverty.

The good news is that this target has been reached ahead of the deadline. On November 23, the government of Guizhou Province in southwest China approved nine of its counties to be removed from the list of poverty-stricken counties. These are the last of China’s 832 poverty-stricken counties to be lifted out of poverty by this year.

The list of poverty-stricken counties was finalized in 2012. One in every three counties in China was included and only nine provincial-level areas were free of poor counties. These impoverished counties account for half of China’s territory and are home to over 80 million people.