According to a statement posted on the official website of the Central People’s Government of the People's Republic of China, the State Council Steering Committee meeting hosted by Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao passed the “Twelfth Five-Year Plan for the Project on  Resettling Nomadic People within China".The announcement marks a major and seemingly final step toward eliminating the remaining population of nomad herders and eradicating the thousands of years old nomadic way of life.The statement says that “the meeting pointed out that since the new China was established especially since the Reform and Open-up policy was implemented, the Party Central Committee and the State Council have especially emphasized the socio-economic development of pastoral areas, bringing a remarkable improvement to the herders’ living conditions and production mode, causing the majority of herders to be resettled in sedentary areas.”

The Twelfth Five-Year Plan aims to resettle the remaining nomad population of 246,000 households or 1.157 million nomads by 2015, according to the document.

Another earlier statement posted on August 3, 2011 on the same website states that the Chinese Ministry of Finance allocated a special fund of 1.7 billion Yuan to the project of resettling nomadic herders particularly in “Xinjiang (including Xinjiang Development Corps), Inner Mongolia and Tibet”. Confirming the Chinese authorities’ determination to permanently end the nomadic way of life of these regions, the statement also emphasized that “resettling nomadic peoples is a popular project that builds a harmonious society in pastoral areas.”