BEIJING (AP) — Even with its booming
economy, China now has more poor people — at least officially.
A sharp upward revision in the official
poverty line, announced by the government Tuesday, means that 128 million
Chinese in rural areas now qualify as poor, 100 million more than under the
previous standard.
The new threshold of about $1 a day nearly
doubles the previous amount. While the revised poverty line is still below the
World Bank threshold of $1.25 a day, the change brings China closer to
international norms and better reflects the country's overall higher standards
of living after three decades of buoyant growth.
The old limit, first set in the 1990s and
notched up periodically thereafter, focused on the bedrock poor at a time China
was still largely rural and impoverished. As the country has climbed toward
middle income status, experts from the World Bank and Chinese think tanks have
urged the government to raise the threshold to capture more poor Chinese.
"The previous poverty line underestimated
the number of poor people in rural China," the official newspaper China
Daily quoted Wang Sangui, a rural development expert at Renmin University, as
saying. "Only 2.8 percent of the rural population was officially
considered poor, which was lower than in many developed countries such as the
United States, which has a poverty rate of about 15 percent."
With the higher threshold, more people qualify
for government assistance. Funding for poverty relief is also being raised more
than 20 percent this year to 27 billion yuan, or $4.2 billion, the China Daily
reported.
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