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23m Chinese cannot afford food, clothes
(Shanghai Daily)
Updated: 2006-03-29 13:39
While 23.65 million Chinese people in rural areas still cannot
afford daily food and clothes and another 40.67 million rural residents are
earning between 683 yuan (US$85) to 944 yuan per person a year, the country has
cut the amount of people below the poverty line by 20.35 million between 2001
and 2005, a senior official of the State Council said, Xinhua news agency
reported today. The official poverty line is set by China at 944 yuan per
year.
Some 23.65 million Chinese people in rural
areas still cannot afford daily food and clothes and another 40.67 million
rural residents are earning between 683 yuan (US$85) to 944 yuan per
person a year. In contrast, till 2003 China had registered about
236,000 people each with more than US$1 million in assets.
[163.com] |
Liu Jian, director of the central
government's poverty relief office, said during a national poverty-fighting
conference that China has decreased the number of the rural residents who cannot
afford food and clothes by 5.62 million in the past five years.
China has built 800 training centers around the country to fight poverty and
has established a nationwide training network since 2001, training 3.18 million
rural residents and supporting many enterprises to lift poor families above the
poverty line.
As the remaining impoverished families are in even worse condition, the cost
to lift them out of poverty is greater. The country managed to take 1.12 million
rural residents out of poverty on average for the previous five years, much
fewer than the numbers in the 1980s and 1990s.
The country now has about 148,000 poor villages, mainly in the Qing-Tibet
Plateau area.
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