President Xi Jinping is paying great attention to poverty reduction work during his inspection tour of the mountainous Chongqing municipality.

Immediately after Xi got off his plane on Monday he boarded a train and then traveled by road, heading to a primary school and a village in the Shizhu Tujia autonomous county, in a remote part of Southwest China.

To build a moderately prosperous society, it is crucial to raise rural living standards, Xi said while visiting the home of Ma Pei­qing, an 85-year-old farmer in the village of Huaxi, Zhongyi township, who joined the Communist Party of China 45 years ago.

"Seeing that the people are guaranteed the basic necessities of food and clothing, as well as better and better access to education, medical care and safe housing, I feel relieved," Xi told the villagers.

Happiness is achieved through hard work, Xi said, adding that people in poverty-stricken regions should make full use of the Party's policies and work hard for a better life.

Xi also visited the home of Tan Dengzhou, a Huaxi farmer who was injured in a fall while working in March last year. Tan's wife, 74-year-old Jiao Guangrun, suffers from chronic ailments including asthma and rheumatism. The local government has categorized Tan's family as impoverished.

Xi asked about the details of the elderly couple's income and expenses, including how much of their medical costs were covered by the rural pension system and how much money they received from their children.

Tan and his wife spent 150,000 yuan ($22,370) on medicine last year, and they received 140,000 yuan of medical assistance from the local government. Taking the family's 11,000 yuan annual rural pension and other income from their farmlands into account, they saw a net income of 15,936 yuan last year.

Only when the Party's policy benefits the people will the policy be a good one, Xi said while talking with Tan.

China has set the goal of lifting all the country's rural impoverished people out of poverty by 2020, which will be the first time in thousands of years of Chinese history that extreme poverty will have been eliminated.

On Monday afternoon, Xi visited Zhongyi's primary school and talked with the teachers and students. A teacher told Xi that she had graduated from the school and returned to it to become a teacher after graduating from college 17 years ago.

Xi told the teacher that her work is meaningful, and he said he hoped to see that more young people settle down in the financially struggling region and contribute to the development of the country's education.

President Xi Jinping visits villagers in Huaxi on Monday to learn about progress in poverty relief and solving prominent issues in the Shizhu Tujia autonomous county, Chongqing, during an inspection tour to the municipality.