The local land resources bureau of Dangyang city, Central China’s Hubei province, has published on its website a report about its poverty alleviation efforts for 2017. After the media reported that it was the same as a previous report of their counterpart in Guanyang county in Southwest China’s Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region, the local government admitted having copied the Guangxi report. People’s Daily comments:

While there are many good examples of government departments working hard to help raise people out of poverty, there are bad examples, too. The land resources bureau of Dangyang is one of them. Having received assignments from higher authorities, they simply held meetings or gave the poor people some money or materials, instead of truly helping them. The Dangyang officials must have achieved little in their daily work, which resulted in them having nothing to say when it came to writing their work report, so they simply copied the report of others who had worked hard to help the poor.

Worse, some officials are reported to falsify documents and data, while certain bureaucrats even attempt to embezzle poverty alleviation funds for their own use. Some of the persons involved have already broken the law or committed crimes, and they deserve legal penalties.

There is not much time left to achieve the goal of lifting all poor people out of poverty by 2020. Yet there are still about 40 million people living in poverty, and it needs more efforts to help them all.

Those who falsify data and documents, instead of truly helping those in need, must pay for their misdeeds.