Improving language and communication skills for poor people is partly a key to meet China's targets of ending absolute poverty by 2020, a Chinese professor said.

He Lin, professor of College of Chinese Language and Literature of Wuhan University in Central China's Hubei province has urged in his recent article that the government should boost investment to improve the literacy of the poor people and teach them to speak the Putonghua (standard Chinese) to facilitate their exchanges with the outside world.

He also said that most of the Chinese people in absolute poverty live in the isolated, mountainous regions in southwestern and northwestern China, which has limited their accesses to the developed regions of this country.