"Voices from the Frontline: China's War on Poverty" is a documentary co-presented by CGTN and PBS SoCal in the United States. It was broadcast in Southern California last week. The documentary was hosted by Dr. Robert Kuhn, who also created CGTN's documentary series, "Closer to China". He's been speaking to our correspondent Liling Tan in New York.

LILING TAN NEW YORK "In Hainan, you observed the entire process of the democratic meeting where villagers voted by raising their hands, what did you make of this and did you think it was an effective way to identify the real poor people?"

DR. ROBERT KUHN HOST, "VOICES FROM THE FRONTLINE: CHINA'S WAR ON POVERTY" "So you see this in what is called a democratic meeting in a very poor village, in the center of the city square, if you could call that, they put 30 or 40 chairs, they have their households and a number of people sat and it was an organized meeting and you can see people taking it very seriously, some people stood up and criticized somebody for not being really poor, but they are poor. It was a real meeting I mean it has all the dynamics of human beings seeking equality in their interpersonal relations. So that's really a nice and important part of the whole process. All these meetings within villages that give the control of the designation of the poverty of coming out or going in, to the peer group. And in most cases, that's hard to game the system because everybody knows you and you can't politicize your way around of one individual because everybody knows everything. It's a human mechanism and whether we see it in a pre-review or we see it as a democratic meeting in towns, that's an effective mechanism."