Entering the home of Er'ri Shujin, it takes a while for one's eyes to adapt to the darkness.
Foul smells fill the air and dung is scattered on the ground, because part of the house is used to shelter the cow. In the part where people live, a plank supported by four bricks makes up the bed and potatoes, some of which have sprouted, are boiled in a pot for lunch.
For the family of five, rice is a luxury, let alone meat, which is served on the dinner table only three times a year.
Er'ri, 45, lives in Liangshan Yi autonomous prefecture in Southwest China's Sichuan province. The mountainous region, with an average altitude of 1,800 meters and where half the population is ethnic Yi people, has been plagued by poverty for generations.
Many people in Liangshan live far away from economically developed areas. The area cannot be reached by modern vehicle and for many, walking is the only way to go out of the mountains.
Like Er'ri, more than 70 million Chinese people are still living in poverty, or in another word, living on slightly more than one dollar a day.
Since the country carried out the opening-up and reform policy beginning in 1978, more than 700 million Chinese people have been lifted out of poverty, but more difficult problems need to be solved in the war on poverty.
"It is an urgent job for governments to carry out more targeted, efficient and reinforced measures to fight poverty for China to become a relatively well-off country by 2020," President Xi Jinping said recently.
With most of the Chinese people having freed from poverty over the past decades, most of the impoverished places left lie in remote and mountainous areas where general economic development and poverty relief methods hardly work.
According to statistics, the funds used to fight poverty by the central government have nearly doubled from 2011 to 2014, but the number of people lifted out of poverty during that time dropped from 43 million in 2011 to 12 million in 2014.
Facing the tough problem of poverty, traditional approaches for relief need an overhaul.
Chang Zongyi is a farmer living in Xihaigu, Northwest China's Ningxia Hui autonomous region, which was listed as one of the world's most uninhabitable places by the United Nations.
His house has a crack from the ceiling to the floor, and he is eligible to receive a 22,000 yuan housing renovation subsidy provided by government. But he did not, because Chang could not afford his portion of the renovation.
To build a brick house, he needs to pay another 60,000 yuan. That's more than he can afford, Chang said.
Most of the renovation subsidies that are meant to help the poorest go to relatively better-off families because the poorest households often cannot afford their portions of the cost, a local official said.
"The method of extensive poverty relief used in the past no longer works when it comes to the most impoverished families. Targeted relief and customized policy are needed to help each household in poverty," said Wang Sangui, a poverty problem expert.
