Li Zhaozhuo, chairman of Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Regional Government, announced on January 22 that China's most populous ethnic group, the Zhuang minority, has shaken off poverty.

Li made the announcement while delivering a government work report at the on-going annual regional people's congress in this capital of the southwest China region.

The Chinese government has long concentrated on poverty relief work and has launched numerous programs throughout the country to help the impoverished out of their circumstances and start to leada prosperous life. The official poverty datum is 550 yuan (about 66.5 US dollars) per annum.

Currently, the average per-capita income for Guangxi farmers isabout 1,800 yuan. The Chinese government has vowed to eradicate poverty by the end of this year.

The Zhuang ethnic group is an aboriginal people in areas south of the Five Ridges covering Guangdong Province and Guangxi, but now mainly living in Guangxi's Nanning, Bose, Hechi and Liuzhou regions. The minority has a total population of 15 million, equivalent to the population of the Netherlands. Some 10 million of them were living in poverty 15 years ago.

China's painstaking poverty-relief campaign has not only improved the lives of the Zhuang people, it has also helped the ethnic group catch up with the economically-developed coastal areas.

Huang Yuansheng, of Zhuang ethnic background, is a vegetable grower from Tianyang County, a major off-season vegetable production base in Guangxi. Every year, more than 50,000 hectares of vegetables are grown here, with an annual output of 1.3 milliontons.

"It is amazing that we can know vegetable prices in other majorChinese cities without being in those places, and with the information, we can make more money by growing the most needed vegetables at the market," said Huang, pointing to a huge electronic pricing display board erected in a local farmers' market. Per-capita income of farmers in Huang's village amounted to 2,800 yuan last year.

Like Huang and his fellow Zhuang people, extremely poor residents of other ethnic groups in Guangxi have also benefited from the country's numerous poverty relief programs.

The poverty-relief programs launched by the central and local governments include construction of major projects in the poverty-hit areas and improvement of infrastructure there, allocating special funds to support development in economically-backward areas, and encouraging economically-developed regions to aid designated poor areas in central and western China.

In Guangxi alone, well over four billion yuan has been used in the past five years to build highways, water conservancy facilities and housing, to erect telephone lines in the region's poverty-hit areas, or to help local farmers raise cattle and sheepand grow cash crops.

World Bank loans have also been directed to the poverty-relief program in Guangxi since 1995. Thanks to the program, 750,000 poorpeople of the region now have sufficient food and clothing.

Since 1993, local residents living in areas with harsh natural conditions in Guangxi have been encouraged to migrate to areas with better conditions. Some 200,000 local poor people who participated in the program have become better off.

In areas where water resources are scarce, more than 120,000 household water tanks, water storage ponds and water diversion projects have been constructed, and the difficulty of obtaining water for drinking or for irrigation in Guangxi's poverty-hit areas has been solved.

In the meantime, the autonomous region has also invested a hugesum in building roads connecting to 2,200 poor villages, and erecting power and telecommunications transmission lines to link the remote mountainous villages to the outside world.

China plans to pull 10 million people out of poverty this year.