On the morning of February 25, the National Poverty Alleviation Summary and Commendation Conference was held in the Great Hall of the People in Beijing. Xi Jinping, General Secretary of the CPC Central Committee, President of the State and Chairman of the Central Military Commission, presented awards to the winners of the honorary title of National Model for Poverty Alleviation and delivered important speeches. Research fellow of Shanghai Jiao Tong University (SJTU) Wang Xinze, deputy head of Human Resources Division of SJTU School of Medicine Ruijin Hospital Luwan Branch Zhu Bin, Director of the President’s Office of Shanghai No. 6 People’s Hospital Di Jianzhong, and the deceased cardiologist at the Shigatse Municipal People’s Hospital and the Cardiology Department of Shanghai Children’s Hospital Zhao Jian, won the title of Outstanding Individual in National Poverty Alleviation, and the General Surgery Department of the Xinhua Hospital Affiliated to SJTU School of Medicine won the title of Outstanding Organization in National Poverty Alleviation.

The SJTU CPC Committee has laid solid emphasis on poverty alleviation over the years. It has established the principle of making all-out efforts to alleviate poverty by promoting education, put in place a system of support led by a vice president of SJTU and implemented by a responsible department, appealed to the faculty, students and medics of SJTU and the wider public to contribute to four funds that it created for poverty alleviation, namely “Heart”, “Action”, “Dream” and “Permanence”, and carried out a variety of activities to help alleviate poverty, such as treating children with congenital heart disease in poor families, providing free diagnosis and treatment, sending teachers to teach in villages, offering poor students financial support for their studies, conducting various training sessions, supporting industries with science and technology, and improving local infrastructure. As required by the overall plan developed by China’s Ministry of Education for providing dedicated support to the mountainous regions west of Kunming in Yunnan Province, SJTU has been supporting the Eryuan County in Dali Prefecture of the province since 2012. The two sides have since begun to jointly work for poverty alleviation. The county was lifted out of poverty in 2018. Even so, SJTU has been sticking to the letter of responsibility for poverty alleviation by taking a range of follow-up measures based on the principle of continually fulfilling the responsibility and providing support despite poverty officially eradicated.