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Elderly Get Help During FestivalBy: Unknown
China Daily, February 4, 2000 For more than 8,200 impoverished elderly people nationwide, the first Spring Festival of the new millennium will be a happy one, thanks to the China National Committee on Aging. Ye Yulan, 98, whose son is dead, personally received a red paper envelope containing 500 yuan (US$60) from an official with China National Committee on Aging last Friday. "Thank you, my life is full of happiness with the help of my granddaughter-in-law and the society," said the elderly lady, who lives in the city of Yangquan of North China's Shanxi Province. "Every member of the society should respect and care the elderly," said Zhang Wenfan, chairman of the committee, who is currently on a five-day greeting tour in Yangquan and Yan'an, a sacred place of the Chinese revolution. Ge Shusheng, 67, and his wife, Ye Xiuzheng,64, are an impoverished couple in ill heath living in the mountainous Zhongtai Village of Yan'an, also benefited from Zhang's tour. Zhang said the tour is the prelude to a nationwide campaign to assist the impoverished elderly, which is in it's second phase. The first phase of the campaign was started prior to the celebration of the 50th anniversary of the People's Republic of China and 3,622 elderly and poor people received more than 1.8 million yuan (US$217,000) in aid, a source with the committee told China Daily. Because of the economic imbalance among different regions, there are around 5 million impoverished elderly people in the country, who have more difficulty getting out of poverty. The campaign is part of the Assisting the Elderly Project initiated by the China National Committee on Aging and China Aging Fund in late 1996. Twenty media organizations and the national office of the Assisting the Elderly Project issued a written proposal to solicit support from the public.
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