1. This report was originally produced as a complement to China：Overcoming Rural Poverty，which was published as a World Bank document in 2001. These new reports have been produced at an important juncture as the government of China re-evaluated its poverty reduction strategy and announced the establishment of a new initiative for the development of China's most impoverished western region. The recommendations presented in the World Bank report emphasize the need for strengthening poverty reduction interventions directed towards the interior provinces，and in particular towards highland and mountainous regions where China's absolute poor are concentrated，and where a number of factors（remote location，poor environment and infrastructure，as well as social and cultural factors）interact to make further poverty reduction increasingly difficult.