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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.
The following is an introduction to China's development-oriented poverty
relief for the rural areas:
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