CPC Leaders Call for Efforts to Help People in Need

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Last updated at: (Beijing Time) Tuesday, February 05, 2002

CPC Leaders Call for Efforts to Help People in Need

Addressing a meeting on reducing poverty and helping the needy on February 4, Jiang Zemin, general secretary of the CPC Central Committee, called on leading officials at all levels to do more for people in need, to consolidate the Party's leading position, promote social and economic development and safeguard social stability.

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CPC Leaders Call for Efforts to Help People in Need

The leadership of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Monday discussed plans to help the needy people in China manage difficult times in both their life and work.

Addressing a meeting on reducing poverty and helping the needy, Jiang Zemin, general secretary of the CPC Central Committee, called on leading officials at all levels to do more for people in need, to consolidate the Party's leading position, promote social and economic development and safeguard social stability.

Attending the meeting were Jiang, and the other members of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee -- Li Peng, Zhu Rongji, Li Ruihuan, Hu Jintao, Wei Jianxing and Li Lanqing.

Not an easy task: 30 million poor people

The leaders recognized that it is not an easy task to help impoverished people cope with difficulties in daily life and work.

There are 30 million people still living in poverty in rural China and a significant number of laid-off workers from State-owned firms in urban China despite China's rapid economic growth, rising standard of living and its marked progress in the anti-poverty campaign of the past decade.

Most of the 30 million poor people live in remote areas with harsh natural conditions where it remains a backbreaking job just to produce enough to eat and wear. The areas are often former revolutionary bases in war years and are inhabited by ethnic minority groups.

Main contents

The leaders held that to help the poor is a top priority in the modernization drive which concerns the overall situation.

The meeting called on governments at all levels to carry out all the policies and measures designed to help poor people in both rural and urban areas, including those of anti-poverty development, disaster control and relief, basic life allowance for laid-off workers from State-owned firms and reemployment.

The meeting also urged Party committees and governments at all levels to take all necessary measures to ensure the impoverished in China have a happy lunar Chinese New Year, the most important traditional festival in China which falls on February 12.

All sectors of society, including non-communist parties, non-governmental organizations, businesses, institutions, colleges and universities and the armed forces, were urged by the leadership to participate in anti-poverty activities, and to cultivate the custom of helping the poor in a lasting drive to eliminate poverty.

The meeting also called on the Party to regard the job of helping the poor people as one of the important ways to improve the Party's work style, closely linking the task of improving the style with helping the people in need.

During the meeting, officials in charge of the country's poverty alleviation organization and labor and social security departments briefed the Party leaders on their work of helping the poor people.

White Paper on Rural China's Poverty Reduction

The Information Office of the State Council issued Monday, October 15, 2001, a white paper on poverty reduction in rural China. The following is the full text of the white paper entitled "The Development-oriented Poverty Reduction Program for Rural China":

China is the largest developing country in the world, its population making up about 22 percent of the earth's total. For quite a long time in the past, China was bedeviled by poverty, for various reasons. Since the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949, and especially since the end of the 1970s, when China introduced the policy of reform and opening to the outside world, the Chinese Government, while devoting considerable efforts to all-round economic and social development, has implemented nationwide a large-scale program for development-oriented poverty relief in a planned and organized way. With the main objective of helping poverty-stricken people to solve the problem of food and clothing, this program has gone a long way toward alleviating poverty. Between 1978 and 2000, the number of poverty-stricken people without enough to eat and wear in the rural areas decreased from 250 million to 30 million, and the proportion of poverty- stricken people in the total rural population dropped from 30.7 percent to about three percent. The strategic objective set by the Chinese Government for enabling all poverty-stricken people in rural areas to have enough to eat and wear by the end of the 20th century has basically been realized.

I. The Course and Achievements of the Aid-the-Poor Program

II. Policy Guarantee for the Aid-the-Poor Program

III. Major Contents and Channels of the Aid-the-Poor Program

IV.The Aid-the-Poor Program for the Special Groups Among the Impoverished

V. The Aid-the-Rural-Poor Program in the Early Period of the 21st Century

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