Impoverished county visited by Xi shakes off poverty

ZHENGZHOU -- Lankao county in Central China's Henan province Monday announced its withdrawal from the country's list of impoverished counties.

It is the second of its kind, after Jinggangshan in eastern China's Jiangxi province was removed from the list in late February.

A county can be removed from the list if less than 2 percent of population is classified as "impoverished."

In 2014, 11.8 percent of Lankao's population was in poverty, but the ratio has now dropped to 1.27 percent, according to an assessment by the Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

After evaluation results were examined and approved by the State Council Leading Group Office of Poverty Alleviation and Development, Henan Provincial Government greenlit the county's withdrawal Monday.

"Today is a commemorable day," said Cai Songtao, secretary of the Lankao County Committee of the Communist Party of China (CPC) at a press conference. "Getting rid of poverty has been the ardent wish of Lankao residents for decades."

In 2014, as part of the efforts to close Party-people relations, Xi Jinping, general secretary of the CPC Central Committee, paired himself with Lankao and visited it twice.

That year, Lankao County authorities made a commitment to cast off poverty in three years and achieve moderate prosperity in seven years.

To achieve success, Cai said that the county government made poverty alleviation its first and primary task.

"Over the process, we've realized that poverty alleviation is not the main goal, but that achieving moderate prosperity matters more," he said.