Minister: China's ethnic minorities victims of poverty

Over six million members of China’s ethnic minority groups need to be relocated in order to provide them with basic living facilities, state media reported, citing a senior government official. Yang Jing, minister of the State Ethnic Affairs Commission, said construction of adequate infrastructure in ethnic minority regions remains weak while the gap between inland minority groups and developed areas is ever widening. "A large segment of the ethnic minority population is still unable to access safe drinking water and some ethnic minority people in mountainous Southwest China still live in mud and straw huts," Yang said in a report to the country’s top legislature. The report said the average GDP per capita in ethnic minority regions is only two-thirds of the 2009 national average and more than 19 million of these people still live below the rural poverty line of an annual income of US$180.