Northwest China's Gansu Province plans to relocate about 10,000 households from barren, quake-hit areas this year to neighboring Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, local officials said Wednesday.

The households, mainly from quake-hit Longnan, Gannan, Dingxi and Wuwei, would relocate to Xinjiang, which has vast areas of undeveloped land, a provincial poverty alleviation office official said. He did not specify how many people would be involved.

Some 2.3 million people in Gansu fell back into poverty at the end of 2008 mainly because of the May 12 earthquake, That shift took the total impoverished population of Gansu to 6.81 million, or 33 percent of the total, the official said.

The 8.0-magnitude quake killed more than 69,000 people in Sichuan and neighbouring Gansu and Shaanxi provinces and left nearly 18,000 missing.

(Xinhua News Agency March 4, 2009)