NEW LAUNCH: A Long March-4C rocket carrying the Yaogan-25 remote sensing satellite blasts off from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in Jiuquan, Gansu Province, on December 11 (YAN YAN)

China has identified 128,000 impoverished villages and 92 million people living in poverty, said a senior poverty alleviation official on December 6.

According to Liu Yongfu, head of the State Council Leading Group Office of Poverty Alleviation and Development, poverty has declined substantially in China, but the country still has 832 poor counties and districts.

Approximately 116,600 work teams with 466,000 members in total have been dispatched to the villages for poverty alleviation, he told a seminar in central China's Hubei Province.

"Almost all underprivileged households have a government official responsible for poverty alleviation work," he said.

Li Jinzao, head of the China National Tourism Administration, said that the country has so far lifted more than 8 million people out of poverty by developing tourism.

To expand the safety net for those in poverty, the national poverty line was increased from 206 ($33.5) yuan in 1986 to 2,300 yuan ($374) per annum in 2011.

Smart City

Karamay, an oil-rich city in northwest China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, became the first in the country to provide bundled voice, video and data services to all residents.

Known as the Triple-Play service, the system depends on a converged fiber-optic network jointly offered by Internet, cable TV and telecommunication providers. In 2011, a 220-million-yuan ($36 million) project was launched in Karamay to pilot the service.

Over the past three years, the fiber-optic connections have been installed into all residential communities in the city, enabling each of the city's roughly 130,000 households to enjoy Internet speeds of 100 megabits.

According to the city's information management authorities, the combined optic network building has not only reduced telecom infrastructure investment by 75 percent and maintenance costs by 50 percent when compared to the expenditures on facilities built separately by telecom and TV providers, it has also helped residents spend 60 percent less on the services than before.

Karamay has become a demonstration city for the construction of a Triple-Play optic network, said Su Guoping, Deputy Director of the Xinjiang Regional Commission of Economic and Information Technology.

Users can choose each of the telecom providers for the combined Internet, telecommunication and TV services at home.

Elsewhere in the country, the new network, which would help break up traditional telecom and television monopolies, still faces difficulties being implemented.