The Canadian Red Cross currently supports seven health and disaster response projects in Xinjiang, Gansu, Qunghai, Inner Mongolia and Sichuan provinces. These projects include assistance to three township hospitals and two emergency medical training programs. The new Eyesight Recovery Program will help to reduce the number of individuals blinded by cataracts in a country where more than five million patients await cataract surgery. The rural population is the primary beneficiary of these projects. Although the standard of living in recent years has increased for millions of Chinese, vast economic differences remain between the more developed coastal provinces and the rural and remote interior provinces.
China is also one of the most disaster-prone countries in the world.
Over the past decade, natural disasters in China have left millions homeless, cost billions of dollars in damages and caused high rural unemployment rates impoverishing thousands of families.