Constantly increasing financial support and actively organizing paired-up assistance

Over the past 60 years both the central and local governments at all levels have gradually increased their efforts to extend fiscal transfer payments to the minority areas. In the 1950s the state began to implement preferential fiscal policies for these areas, such as "unified collection of revenues and allocation of expenditures and subsidies for the needy," and raising the proportion of the financial reserve fund (two percentage points higher than in other regions). From 1980 to 1988 the central financial authorities adopted a quota subsidy system with a yearly increase of ten percent for the five autonomous regions and the three provinces with large ethnic-minority populations -- Guizhou, Yunnan and Qinghai. In 1994 the state began to adopt a tax-sharing system, and introduced the system of policy-related transfer payments to the minority areas. In 2000 China initiated transfer payments for the minority areas on top of the general transfer payments and special-fund transfer payments as prescribed by relevant regulations. From 1978 to 2008 the total transfer payments by the central financial authorities to the minority areas totaled 2,088.94 billion yuan, with an annual increase of 15.6 percent. In 2008 alone the amount was 425.3 billion yuan, making up 23.8 percent of the nation's total transfer payments.

According to incomplete statistics, from 1959, when democratic reform began in Tibet, to 2008, fiscal assistance from the central budget to Tibet reached 201.9 billion yuan, with an annual increase of nearly 12 percent; from 1955, when the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region was established, to 2008, the fiscal assistance from the central budget to Xinjiang reached 375.202 billion yuan, with an annual increase of 11 percent, the sum in 2008 being 68.56billion yuan.

In addition, the state has also set up a variety of special funds to help resolve the difficulties encountered by the minority areas and accelerate their development, including education development subsidies for the ethnic minorities set up in 1951, minority area subsidies set up in 1955, the minority-area reserve fund set up in 1964, subsidy for border construction set up in 1977, fund for aiding economically under-developed areas set up in1980, and fund for the development of the ethnic minorities set up in 1992.