A webinar themed “Poverty Alleviation and Human Rights Protection” was held Monday to introduce China’s latest poverty alleviation efforts and draw insights on global poverty relief from international experts.
Since the founding of new China in 1949, China has made a great contribution to global poverty alleviation. China’s poverty reduction endeavors have involved the largest population and went through the longest span of time. China’s notable achievements in poverty reduction is of global meaning to human rights protection.
Yan Qing, associate professor at the School of Journalism& Communication, Jinan University, said that communication has a role to play in helping people shake off poverty. Thanks to its good interactivity, social media is instrumental in cutting poverty and human rights protection.
Yang Fuqiang, associate researcher of the Institute of Sociology, Xinjiang Academy of Social Sciences, pointed out that Xinjiang’s achievements in poverty alleviation show the advantage of China’s socialist system which can pool strengths to deal with key undertakings. Xinjiang has upgraded infrastructure such as roads, kindergartens and clinics to improve people’s lives.
Sanchita, deputy delegate of Bangladesh’s Permanent Mission to Geneva, said that the spread of the novel coronavirus compounds poverty alleviation across the world. Under the severe circumstances, the international cooperation mechanism is crucial for fighting epidemic and lifting people out of poverty. To help people get rid of poverty, we still face a lot of challenges which call for closer cooperation between governments, international organizations and media to maintain the hard-earned outcomes of poverty alleviation and protect human rights.
By the end of 2018, the number of rural people in poverty had decreased to 16.6 million and poverty rate dropped to 1.7%. 436 out of 832 poor counties in China had shaken off poverty. 102,000 out of China’s 128,000 indigent villages had been lifted out of poverty. China has become the first country in the world to achieve the poverty reduction goal of the UN Millennium Development Goals.
The video conference was jointly sponsored by China’s Permanent Mission to the United Nations at Geneva and Other International Organizations in Switzerland and the China Society for Human Rights Studies, and was organized by Jinan University. Officials from Permanent Missions of Malaysia, Iran, Syria and Venezuela to Geneva and representatives from the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights and NGOs also joined the webinar.
