The poverty rate in regions populated by ethnic minorities is 13.8 percentage points higher than China's national average, according to official statistics.

A survey released on November 28 by the State Ethnic Affairs Commission revealed that in 2011, there were 39.17 million impoverished people living in rural areas in eight provinces and autonomous regions predominantly inhabited by ethnic minorities—Inner Mongolia, Guangxi, Tibet, Ningxia, Xinjiang, Yunnan, Guizhou and Qinghai.

They accounted for 26.5 percent of the total rural population in those regions, and made up 32 percent of the poor people living in the countryside in the 31 provincial-level regions on the Chinese mainland, according to the commission.

China in 2011 raised the national poverty threshold for farmers to 2,300 yuan ($369) in annual net income from the previous 1,274 yuan ($205) set in 2010, including more people in the government's poverty alleviation programs.

Under the new threshold standard, 122 million Chinese people, or 12.7 percent of the rural population, were eligible for government anti-poverty subsidies last year.

Ethnic minority regions are still the most challenging and crucial parts of the country's poverty alleviation efforts, the commission said.