Reduction in poverty 'enviable'

The proportion of impoverished Chinese fell from 65 percent of the population in 1981 to 4 percent in 2007, during which time more than half a billion people were hoisted above the poverty line, the World Bank's newly released poverty assessment report on China has said.

Entitled From Poor Areas to Poor People: China's Evolving Poverty Reduction Agenda, the report called China's poverty reduction during the last 25 years "enviable".

It pointed out the rapid growth resulting from economic reforms had been central to China's successful poverty alleviation. From 1981 to 2005, real per capita GDP grew by 8.3 percent annually, while the poverty headcount index fell by 7.1 percent per year.