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Chinese President Xi Jinping said that shaking off poverty is not the finish line but the starting point of a new life and new endeavor, at a national commendation conference in Beijing on Feb 25.

China has lifted nearly 100 million rural people in 832 national-level poverty-stricken counties out of poverty since 2013.

Now that China has eradicated poverty, it's time to ensure that once poverty-stricken people do not return to their former state by providing them with opportunities to make a living and enjoy a better quality of life.

Poverty-relief relocation – lifting people from poverty by moving them away from environmentally fragile areas – was one of the major measures China took to eradicate extreme poverty by the end of 2020.

Besides relocation, it's important for local governments to provide impoverished people with skills to earn a living and pursue a better life.

On Jan 18, 2020, residents of poverty-stricken Daojiao Village in Qiaojia County, southwest China's Yunnan Province, were relocated to Maojiawan, Ludian County, where the government had set up several poverty alleviation resettlement areas.

Xiong Guo'en, one of the relocated residents, not only moved from his shabby house to a modern building with elevators, he also found an electric welding job at an enterprise in Ludian County with the support of the poverty alleviation policy and poverty-relief officials. Xiong's wife also found a job at a poverty alleviation workshop.

For people older than Xiong or with low labor skills, poverty-relief officials managing the resettlement sites provide them with public welfare posts, such as a sanitation worker or security guard.

People have walked out of the mountains into universities and cities. People who had been lifted out of poverty have discovered that confidence and dreams will take them far.

Embroidery ladies from Sanglang Village, Wangmo County, Guizhou Province, were invited to sing folk songs and walk on the stage in Buckingham Palace in September 2017.

They amazed global guests by combing traditional Miao embroidery with modern fashion.

In Sanglang Village, they use Miao embroidery to provide for their families. If there had not been a poverty alleviation campaign, the villagers would not have known how much their lives would change as a result of targeted poverty alleviation.

If there had not been the campaign, they would not have thought the traditional handicraft of every family in the village would open the doors to the world for them.

By the end of 2020, Wangmo County's "Embroidery Plan," which guided woman to help develop the local traditional handicraft industry, has enabled more than 15,000 women in the county to embroider a beautiful blueprint for how they can make a living.