At a meeting on poverty relief in Guizhou province, one of China's poorest places, on July 6, it was announced that, while the province had more than 11-million poverty stricken people in 2011, after four years of poverty relief work, 5.26 million had been lifted out of poverty and that the number of impoverished there is expected to drop to 2.13 million by 2020.
Guizhou is also one of China's most heavily State-subsidized provinces when it comes to poverty relief and the State reported that it had 6.23 million impoverished people in 2014, accounting for 8.9 percent of the State's total impoverished population and that, as many as 50 counties with 9,000 communities, are State-supported.
The State has identified 11 impoverished areas with three of them covering 65 counties, and five counties get State policy support and impoverished areas accounting for 85 percent of provincial land area, with about 91 percent of the impoverished living in those areas.
However, the province has seen tremendous improvements in poverty relief and development in recent years and was the first in China to introduce poverty records, and it has a confirmed count of 934 impoverished townships with 7.45 million people and almost 11,600 poverty relief work teams in villages and communities.
Guizhou has plans to pick out six specific areas to increase poverty alleviation, including specific objectives, specific capital utilization and specific results and has spent 10.6 billion yuan ($1.7 billion) on 34 poverty-oriented industrial zones and has provided training for 208,000 people.
Ye Tao, head of the Guizhou poverty relief office, said that, "it is the key to the State's achieving overall well-being". Ye went on to emphasize the need to understand that poverty relief and development are the key to overall well-being, especially in Guizhou, then concluded by saying that 2017 and 2020 are crucial for complete poverty alleviation and higher incomes, and public services that reach the same level as West China.
