Senior officials in some of the poorest provinces in China’s interior admit that their battle against extreme poverty remains tough despite the progress made over the past 10 years, according to an article on the State Council’s Go West website.

Wang Sitie, head of the Poverty-Fighting Bureau of Sichuan province, told journalists that despite the Go West campaign’s many initiatives, the number of people in extreme poverty remains enormous. The task of reducing the poverty-stricken population in the current economic climate is daunting, he added, and relative poverty is becoming a grave issue.

Although Sichuan is the largest provincial economy in China’s west, only Chengdu and some nearby areas can be regarded as approaching prosperous. The vast and mountainous regions that lie north, south and east of the Chengdu plain remain poor due to a lack of infrastructure, he said. Among 181 counties in the province, 160 face the challenging task of lifting their people from poverty. Among them, 36 counties and 10,000 villages are classified as a national priority.

The official said that the national definition for extreme poverty is ‘very low’ − an annual income of Rmb1,196 (US$180), equivalent to 25 per cent of the average income of Sichuan farmers and less than 10 per cent of the average income for farmers in Shanghai. The Sichuan earthquake in May 2008 has also thrown many people back into poverty, he said.

In Liangshan prefecture alone, 944 villages do not have roads and 776 have no electricity. About 140,000 households live in mud homes that do not provide adequate shelter from the rain. The number of households living in extreme poverty with an annual income of less than Rmb625 exceeds 280,000.

Sichuan has a total population of nearly 82m, of whom 51m are farmers, and it is by no means the poorest province in China. The central government has set a target to eliminate extreme poverty by 2020.