Southwest China’s Tibet Autonomous Region lifted 628,000 people out of poverty and delisted 74 county-level areas from the poverty list, said Wu Yingjie, secretary of the Tibet Autonomous Regional Committee of the Communist Party of China (CPC), at a press conference of the State Council Information Office on Saturday.
The per capita disposable income for the region’s rural residents in 2020 rose by 12.7 percent to reach 14,598 yuan (about $2,270), a double-digit increase for 18 consecutive years, Wu added.
By the end of 2019, all the 628,000 registered poor people and 74 poor counties in the region had shaken off poverty, marking the end of absolute poverty in Tibet for the first time in history.
Meanwhile, the Chinese central government allocated an accumulative investment of 1.63 trillion yuan (about $253 billion) in the 70 years after the peaceful liberation of Tibet, he said, adding that the southwestern autonomous region also received a total of 69.3 billion yuan of funds from other provincial and municipal governments in recent years.
Over 590 billion yuan of the total investment were put into the construction of a spate of major projects that have greatly driven the region’s economic development, including the Sichuan-Tibet Highway and Qinghai-Tibet Railway.
On May 23, 1951, an agreement on the peaceful liberation of Tibet was signed. The document, known as the 17-Article Agreement, opened a new chapter in Tibet’s history.
China on Friday issued a white paper on the peaceful liberation of Tibet and its development over the past seven decades.
