The year of 2020 marks the end of China's 13th Five-Year Plan period (2016-2020). Despite rising external challenges and the grave fallout from COVID-19, China has been committed to achieving the goals in poverty alleviation set in the plan with an all-out effort. From 2016 to 2019, more than 50 million poor people in Chinese rural areas shook off poverty. Meanwhile, the per capita net income of the poor rose from 3,416 yuan (about 510.9 dollars) in 2015 to 9,808 yuan (about 1,466.8 dollars) in 2019, an average annual growth of 30.2 percent. Financial support, medical resources as well as technological elements have been pouring into the country's rural areas, the frontier of the historic anti-poverty fight. As of the end of August, the China Development Bank had issued 1.5 trillion yuan (about 224.3 billion dollars) in loans to support poverty relief during the past five years, the policy bank said. Meanwhile, more than 1,000 major urban hospitals in China have delivered paired assistance to hospitals in over 800 poor counties during the country's 13th Five-Year Plan period, official figures showed. Moreover, people in 98 percent of poor villages in areas of extreme poverty have achieved broadband access, which has vastly narrowed the urban-rural digital gap.
