ATHENS, March 21 (Xinhua) -- China's success in ending absolute poverty was commended in Greek media by local experts and commentators recently.
China announced last month that absolute poverty has been eradicated. In 2020, all of China's nearly 100 million rural residents living below the current poverty line shook off poverty after eight years of arduous efforts.
In an article under the title "How China did it" published on Saturday in the news website slpress.gr, Greek scholar Pelagia Karpathiotaki, also Researcher of the Academy of China Open Economy Studies (UIBE), Foreign Expert UIBE, explained the reasons behind the success story.
China achieved the first of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals as set by the UN 10 years ahead of the UN timetable, Karpathiotaki stressed.
China's economic growth from the late 1970s to the present has helped reduce global poverty by 70 percent according to World Bank statistics, she added.
"In order to achieve this, an action plan was implemented with horizontal and vertical policy interventions, setting as the primary goal the eradication of absolute poverty and at the same time adopting a strategy for rural vitalization as this is a key condition for achieving the 2nd centennial goal," the Greek expert explained.
In the last eight years, over 3 million public sector officials were sent from cities and towns to villages to fight poverty "on the front lines", designing and implementing a door-to-door action plan, while the Chinese government had spent nearly 1.6 trillion yuan (246 billion U.S. dollars) of fiscal funds on tackling the problem, she noted.
China is set to achieve its first centenary goal -- completely building a moderately prosperous society in all respects in 2021 -- and embarks on a journey toward the second -- building a great modern socialist country that is prosperous, strong, democratic, culturally advanced, harmonious and beautiful by 2049, the centenary of the People's Republic of China.
"The official announcement of the eradication of extreme poverty in China, by both its President and the relevant UN agencies, is another milestone in its rapid growth," commented Christos Fotiadis, in an article in local "Amarysia" newspaper, outlining more "impressive facts."
The article used a series of facts and numbers showing the tremendous efforts that the Chinese government has put in order to lift some 770 million rural residents out of poverty in the last 40 years. Enditem
