President leads from the front

Poverty alleviation

While inspecting Zhangjiakou in the northern province of Hebei, Xi called for greater efforts to help the poor develop industries that could be expanded in a sustainable manner, establish long-lasting mechanisms for poverty alleviation and create ways of helping people to achieve prosperity.

He stressed the importance of making sure every impoverished family has a strategy to raise their income and every poor person has a means of lifting themselves out of poverty.

"Poverty alleviation is becoming increasingly difficult as it progresses toward the end," Xi said.

During visits to rural settlements he asked residents a number of questions: How did they obtain drinking water? When did they buy their television? How many TV programs could they receive? What activities had been arranged for Spring Festival?

In June, during an inspection tour of Lyuliang, Shanxi province, Xi went into a hut in Zhaojiawa, a hillside village of mud houses, and sat on the kang, a type of traditional brick bed heated by fire that was once widely used in the countryside but is rarely seen nowadays.

"Let's chat," Xi said to Liu Fuyou and his wife, inviting them to sit beside him.

"Are you still able to do farmwork? Is the drought serious this year? Do your children work away from the village? Do they help you out?" the president asked the 70-something couple.

Liu said: "Our family made less than 7,000 yuan ($1,073) last year. We earned about 500 yuan by growing grain. The rest came from the government." His five children left the village when they married, but his 92-year-old mother lives with him and his wife.

Xi told them: "The Party has made a solemn promise that poverty-stricken people and areas will be able to enter a 'moderately prosperous society' along with the rest of the nation."

He added that efforts will be made to ensure the pledge is honored, no matter how arduous the process may be.

Poverty alleviation is high on the list of priorities in the 13th Five-Year Plan (2016-20), and the government has vowed to lift everybody out of poverty by 2020. Last year, more than 10 million rural residents saw their living standards improve.

At the 19th National Congress of the Communist Party of China, Xi was a delegate for southwest China's Guizhou province, one of the country's poorest regions with per capita GDP of around 33,000 yuan, close to 20,000 yuan below the national average in 2016.

While joining the panel discussion with delegates from Guizhou, Xi discussed such things as pork delicacies, liquor production and tourism, all of which are regarded as effective means of bringing extra income for the population.