BEIJING, March 30 (Xinhua) -- China still faces arduous tasks and challenges in its poverty alleviation campaign, and more hard endeavors should be made to fight this battle, according to a Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee Political Bureau statement.

The statement was issued after Friday's meeting of the political bureau on China's poverty reduction work, which was presided over by Xi Jinping, general secretary of the CPC Central Committee.

Participants at the meeting agreed that decisive progress had been made in China's poverty relief work in the past five years, and China must eliminate absolute poverty in the next three years.

China aims to eradicate absolute poverty by 2020. As of the end of 2017, the country had 30.46 million poor residents, compared with 98.99 million in 2012, according to the National Bureau of Statistics.

However, there are still prominent problems regarding poverty reduction, such as failure in policy implementation and mismanagement of poverty relief funds, as well as misconduct such as "formality for formality's sake, bureaucratism, and falsification," the statement said.

China has adopted the strictest evaluations and assessments of poverty alleviation, which is an important guarantee in its victory in the battle against poverty and should be further improved to ensure that poverty reduction work is carried out in a pragmatic, solid and truthful way, it said.

Governments at all levels should make further efforts to implement policies and plans of the CPC Central Committee and ensure that China's poverty alleviation targets will be achieved by 2020, it said.