-- When Xi Jinping became China's top leader in 2012, he inherited a mission China had striven to achieve for generations, which is eradicating absolute poverty.

-- The entire system was mobilized to help the rural indigent population, with more than 250,000 teams dispatched to offer on-the-ground support and over 3 million people sent to countryside as special commissioners for poverty relief.

-- "Through eight years, under the current standard, China has eradicated extreme poverty for the nearly 100 million rural people affected," Xi said in the New Year speech that rang in 2021.

by Xinhua writer Xu Zeyu

BEIJING, Feb. 23  -- Poverty plagued China for thousands of years. Through generations of struggle after the founding of New China in 1949, the country had lifted 700 million out of penury by the end of 2012.

By then, China still had nearly 100 million people living under the poverty line, one ninth of the world's total. About 100,000 villages were yet to be connected by paved roads; some 4,000 villages had no access to electricity; and 8.3 percent of the country's rural households eked out a living in ramshackle, grass-thatched mud huts.

In November 2012, Xi Jinping became China's top leader, and he inherited a mission China had striven to achieve for generations, which is eradicating absolute poverty. The Communist Party of China (CPC) aimed to reach the goal by the end of 2020.

"To achieve this goal, China has to lift 10 million people out of poverty every year," said Eduardo Regalado, senior researcher at Cuba's International Policy Research Center. "That is, 20 people every minute."