脱贫摘帽(tuōpín zhāimào): Poverty hat is taken off

On Monday, the government of Lankao county in Central China's Henan province announced that it is no longer on the country's list of impoverished counties. It is the second county this year to achieve this after Jiangxi province's Jinggangshan, which was removed from the list late last month.

A county can be removed from the central government's list if less than 2 percent of its population is classified as impoverished, having a personal daily income of less than $1.5. Three years ago, the poverty-stricken population in Lankao was 11.8 percent. It is 1.27 percent now.

Although the central government has vowed to eliminate poverty by 2020, which means there will be no impoverished counties nationwide, the county governments must be practical with their poverty alleviation efforts, since poverty in different places has different causes and thus entails different poverty alleviation measures to target their specific difficulties.

Also, the provincial governments must have a set of objective and professional criteria to evaluate a county government's performance in poverty alleviation work. The authorities must be prudent in making such conclusions as a county's "poverty hat is taken off". Some of the poverty-stricken population may have more income this year, because of government's huge input, which disqualifies them as impoverished people. However, they may return to poverty again in the future if the government's input is not sustained, or if the conditions in education and public services, which prevented them from developing the capacity to pursue better lives previously, have not fundamentally improved.