Exemplary poverty alleviation success: China Daily editorial

The State Council Information Office released a white paper, China's Practice in Poverty Reduction, on Tuesday which shares with the world how China has achieved its goal of eradicating abject poverty from the country.

With a population of nearly one-fifth of the world's total, it has been an immense challenge for China to lift more than 770 million poverty-stricken rural villagers out of poverty in a little more than four decades since the reform and opening-up policy was implemented in the late 1970s.

In accordance with the World Bank's international poverty line, the total number of people China has lifted out of poverty is 70 percent of the world's total in the same period. The country has attained the poverty alleviation target 10 years ahead of that of the United Nations' 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.

What China has achieved has not only contributed to the global endeavor to reduce poverty. It also provides successful experience that other countries can learn from. Although the causes of poverty in other countries may vary, China is more than willing to share the policies it has tried and tested and which have proved effective.

The importance China's top authorities have attached to the task has made it possible to work out the right policies and have these policies carried out to the letter, from the central government through to the lowest level governments.

To ensure this, government officials from different levels have been dispatched to villages not only to conduct fact-finding missions, but also to draw up and carry out specific plans to solve the problems on the front line of the poverty battle.

It is because of the importance given to eliminating poverty that the focus has always been not just on lifting people out of poverty but also helping them make a living. Relocating those households in remote places with harsh natural conditions to sites with conditions more conducive to them fending for themselves is an example of how different policies have been adopted for different cases.

Fortune favors those who help themselves. Policies have been made to tap the potential of various localities, and efforts have been made to stimulate the initiative of poverty-stricken villagers to solve their own problems.

By helping poverty-stricken villagers find a way to improve their living standards through their own efforts rather than just providing handouts, the poverty alleviation campaign consecrated by specific policies has instilled in villagers the awareness that their own efforts make the real difference once the right direction has been determined.

The elimination of abject poverty has laid a solid foundation for China to further its development for the building of a modern socialist country. In the same way, poverty alleviation is important for the international community to build a better world for all.