ISLAMABAD: Prime Minister Imran Khan on Sunday took to popular social media site Twitter to felicitate Chinese President Xi Jinping and the Chinese government on what he called the ‘momentous achievement’ of eradicating extreme poverty across China.
Chinese President Xi Jinping on Thursday declared ‘complete victory’ on eradicating extreme poverty in China at a national commendation conference – four months before the centennial of the founding of the Communist Party of China (CPC) – marking another great miracle the Party leading the world’s most populous nation has accomplished.
The convening of the commendation conference to honour the country’s outstanding poverty alleviation fighters at the time showed China’s development is entering a new phase with a more ambitious goal expected in the second hundred years under the leadership of the CPC, and the declaration of the victory can also boost confidence in the world which is on the hard battle with the Covid-19 pandemic, poverty and food scarcity, say experts.
“I want to congratulate President Xi Jinping & the Chinese govt for the momentous achievement of eradicating extreme poverty in their country. Never before in history have 750 million people been taken out of extreme poverty in a span of 35 years,” said the prime minister in his tweet.
In a subsequent tweet, PM Imran said that for developing countries like Pakistan, there are lessons to be learnt and said that Pakistan can replicate the Chinese achievement by rooting out poverty from Pakistan.
“With determination and commitment, we can do the same for our people,” he added.
This is not the first time that Prime Minister Khan has lauded the Chinese President’s quest to eradicate poverty from China.
On January 1, 2021, praising the Chinese development model, Prime Minister Imran Khan had said his government wants to learn from China’s industrial development to accelerate economic growth and eradicate poverty.
“If we can learn from any one country in the world, it is China. Their development model suits Pakistan the best,” Imran Khan said while speaking at a ceremony in Islamabad.
“The speed with which China developed in the last 30 years is something we can learn from,” he had added. PM Imran Khan stressed that Beijing had managed to prove that poverty alleviation is real development.
“The way they industrialised, made special export zones, brought investments from abroad, and used those investments to increase their exports, all resulted in China increasing its wealth,” he maintained.
“They used that money to bring their population out of poverty […] there is no other example of this in history.” He added that his government was focused on making Pakistan a welfare state and eradicating poverty.
Imran Khan is also all in praises for China’s anti-graft campaign. During his trip to China in October 2019, Imran Khan had said that he wished he could follow the example of Chinese President Xi Jinping and send 500 corrupt individuals in Pakistan to jail.
Speaking at the China Council for Promotion of International Trade, the premier had said that one thing he had learned from China was how the country’s leadership tackled corruption.
‘One of President Xi Jinping’s biggest crusade has been against corruption,’ he had said, adding that he had heard that some 400 ‘ministerial-level people’ had been convicted on charges of corruption and put behind jail in the last five years in China.
