The Party has set the goal of lifting all the country's rural impoverished people out of poverty by 2020, which will be the first time in thousands of years of Chinese history that extreme poverty has been eliminated.

Noting that the task of poverty elimination will be extremely arduous in the next two years, Xi called for strong confidence, firm determination, all-around efforts and targeted measures to ensure the achievement of the poverty elimination goal.

The standard for poverty reduction is to ensure that poor people have access to food and clothes and that they are covered by the basic public services of medicine, education and housing, Xi said.