Foreword

Poverty is a challenge facing all countries and the international community as a whole. To promote development, eliminate poverty and achieve common prosperity is an ideal that humanity constantly pursues.

China is a developing country with the largest population in the world, featuring a poor economic foundation and noticeable unbalanced development. In particular, it has a large poverty-stricken population in the rural areas, rendering the mission to reduce poverty particularly difficult. For this reason, China' s poverty reduction program is, to a large extent, nothing but solving the poverty problem in the rural areas.

The Chinese government has always made poverty reduction an important goal and task of national development, adhered to the principle of putting people first, and worked hard to enable all the people to enjoy the fruits of economic and social development. It was in the mid-1980s that the Chinese government started the development-oriented poverty reduction program in the rural areas in an organized and planned way. It formulated and implemented the Seven-year Priority Poverty Reduction Program (1994-2000), the Outline for Poverty Reduction and Development of China's Rural Areas (2001-2010), and the Outline for Development-oriented Poverty Reduction for China's Rural Areas (2011-2020), and a few other poverty reduction plans, making poverty reduction a common aim and action of the whole society. China's development-oriented poverty reduction program in the rural areas has promoted social harmony and stability, fairness and justice, and made contributions to the development and progress of the country's cause of human rights.

Poverty reduction is a common cause of the entire human society, and China's development-oriented poverty reduction program is an important component of the world's poverty reduction efforts. China has realized, ahead of schedule, the goal of cutting the poverty-stricken population by half, as listed in the United Nations Millennium Development Goals, thus making great contributions to the world's poverty reduction efforts.

In 2001, the Chinese government issued a white paper titled The Development-oriented Poverty Reduction Program for Rural China. Here, this new white paper is an account of the progress of this program over the past decade.