China steps up war on poverty

Wang Qin, 59, collects scrap at a demolished residential district on the outskirts of Beijing, working 15 hours a day and struggling on her own to pay for her granddaughter's education.

She worries that her own home, a small illegally constructed shack where she lives with her granddaughter and mentally ill husband, might also be bulldozed by local authorities. The family lives off the 1,500 yuan ($228) a month Wang makes selling scrap and receives no assistance from the Beijing government.

As migrants from another province, they are not recognized as residents of the capital despite having lived there since 2014. Since she is not registered in Beijing, Wang has to pay more for things like school and medical care - a hardship for migrants in cities, where costs such as housing are also far higher than in the countryside.

Wang's plight is a common one among millions of poor migrants in China's big cities, as well as in the rural areas from which so many of them come, highlighting the challenges of the government's campaign to wipe out extreme poverty by 2020.

President Xi Jinping made the campaign one of his signature policy issues after pledging in 2015 that China would lift the 70 million people living under the poverty level at the time out of poverty by 2020. The campaign has been ratcheted up as the Communist Party prepares to hold a twice-a-decade leadership meeting on Wednesday.

He added: "With the active participation of all parts of society, it can be said that the battle against poverty has achieved significant results." Asked by Reuters about people like Wang, the scrap collector, Liu said migrants could receive benefits in their hometowns, noting that city dwellers were covered by urban social security programs.

Beijing has pledged to spend 86 billion yuan on poverty alleviation this year, 30 percent more than last year, according to the Ministry of Finance. Liu said direct spending by central and local governments on poverty alleviation from 2013 to 2017 totaled 461.2 billion yuan, adding that other types of government spending also had an impact.

-Reuters, Beijing