Yunnan eradicates absolute poverty, through many ways

With government help, more than 3.18 million people in southwest China's Yunnan Province have found jobs in other regions, a move that will help them shake off poverty, officials said here Tuesday.

A labor transfer policy was initiated in 2015 to lift impoverished households out of poverty by obtaining employment in other regions, Wang Yubo, acting governor of Yunnan, told a press conference in the provincial capital of Kunming.

Wang said that considering the inconvenience caused by the COVID-19 epidemic, the province even arranged buses and charter flights to help the labor forces reach their places of employment.

Apart from the labor transfer, Yunnan has been bolstering its poverty alleviation work by cooperating with Shanghai and the southern province of Guangdong, two economically-active regions in China.

Since 2016, Yunnan has received over 14.1 billion yuan (about 2.2 billion U.S. dollars) in financial assistance from Shanghai and Guangdong, with 6,614 assistance projects completed.

Shanghai and Guangdong have sent 837 cadres and 3,680 professional and technical personnel to Yunnan.

The two regions have guided enterprises to invest 16.2 billion yuan in Yunnan, benefiting 410,800 impoverished people. A total of 26 industrial parks have been built in the province, and 50,500 jobs have been provided in 698 poverty-relief workshops, Wang said.

In the education and healthcare fields, 280 hospitals in Shanghai and Guangdong have paired with 259 healthcare institutions in Yunnan, and 413 schools in the two regions have paired with 422 schools in impoverished counties of Yunnan.

During the past five years, Yunnan has relocated around 1.5 million people from inhospitable areas to places with better natural and living conditions.

More than 2,800 relocation communities have been built, including 19 with more than 10,000 people in each site, said Ruan Chengfa, Party secretary of Yunnan.

Since 2015, the central government has allocated 55.7 billion yuan in special funds for poverty alleviation to Yunnan.

Yunnan announced on Nov. 14 that the province had eradicated absolute poverty, with the remaining nine counties removed from the list of poverty-stricken counties.

The population of impoverished rural residents in Yunnan was more than 8.8 million in 2012, and all of them have been lifted out of poverty.