‘BRI can help lift 7.6 million people out of extreme poverty’

March 3, Kathmandu: The Chinese ambassador to Nepal, Hou Yanqi, has said that a research report of the World Bank has shown that the China-proposed Belt and Road Initiative could help lift 7.6 million people in participating countries out of extreme poverty and 32 million people out of moderate poverty.

In an article published in the national English daily “The Rising Nepal”, ambassador Yanqi informed that around 98.99 million impoverished rural residents living under the current poverty line had been lifted out of poverty in China in the latest poverty eradication drive.

“In Tibet Autonomous Region, 74 impoverished counties and 628,000 impoverished residents were all lifted out of poverty in 2019, and poverty was eliminated in Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region with a cumulative population of 3,089,000 reaching the line by the end of 2020,” Yanqi said.

China, on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party of China (CPC), had declared a complete victory over absolute poverty.

Stating that the Chinese President Xi Jinping himself had led the fight against extreme poverty, ambassador Yanqi said, “China has invested accumulative fiscal funds of nearly 1.6 trillion Yuan into poverty alleviation over the past eight years. A total of 255,000 working teams were dispatched to offer on-the-ground support and over 3 million people were sent to the countryside as special commissioners for poverty relief.”

China’s achievement has made an important contribution to the global poverty reduction efforts and by the World Bank’s standard, China contributed more than 70 per cent to global poverty reduction since the launch of reform and opening up, according to ambassador Yanqi.

Congratulating Nepal for graduating from the Least Developed Country category, the Chinese ambassador wished “that the people all walks of life would commit to maintaining political stability, focusing on economic and social development, continuously improving people’s livelihood, so as to realise the vision of Prosperous Nepal, Happy Nepali and achieve the goal of becoming a middle income country by 2030.”