China raises poverty line for rural dwellers

China's central government on Tuesday raised the country's rural poverty line by more than 80 percent as part of efforts to increase aid to its struggling low-income population, state media reported.
Chinese Communist Party leaders decided to raise the poverty line to 2,300 yuan ($361) in annual net income, the official Xinhua news agency said -- up 80.5 percent from 2010 -- in a move aimed at benefiting farmers.
Last year, there were officially 27 million rural poor in China. Wu Guobao, a senior researcher in rural poverty at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, a government think tank, said the new standard would raise that number to 100 million.
"The previous line was set too low to meet people's basic needs for subsistence and development," Wu told AFP.
As China battles high inflation, with all-important food prices recording double-digit growth, more and more low-income people are struggling to make ends meet.