Xi Jinping tells Chinese officials to ‘finish the journey’ and shifts focus back to fight against poverty
- China’s president urges officials to redouble efforts to meet next year’s targets for tackling poverty and pollution
- Last year emphasis shifted to keeping the economy on track, but latest comments suggest major policy drives have returned to centre stage
President Xi Jinping has urged Chinese officials to redouble their efforts to fight poverty and pollution so that the Communist Party can deliver its promise of creating a “comprehensively well-off society” by the end of next year.
Xi told the Central Commission for Financial and Economic Affairs, the Communist Party’s decision-making body on economic matters, on Monday that they must complete the “last mile” of a journey to eradicate absolute poverty in the world’s most populous country, according to statement published by the official Xinhua news agency.
Xi’s renewed focus on two of his key policy goals follows a change in emphasis last year when the priority shifted towards keeping the economy on track amid a deepening slowdown.
“After the continuous efforts of several generations, we’ve basically realised the goal of building up a comprehensive well-off society,” Xi said. “But there are still some weak links, and we must speed up the process of fixing them.”
Xi also told officials to concentrate resources in areas such as ensuring poor people in remote areas of the country have access to education, basic health care and safe housing.
Poverty reduction is one of the three “key battles” that Xi has promised to fight, along with pollution control and financial risk control, and the president recently made a tour of villages in a remote and mountainous area in the southwest of the country to see how the drive to eliminate the last pockets of poverty was progressing.
The 2020 goal is the first milestone in Xi’s grand dream for China that will see the country become “a modernised socialist country” by 2035 and a “powerful socialist country by 2050”.