Report on the Work of the Government

BEIJING - Following is the full text of the Report on the Work of the Government delivered by Premier Wen Jiabao at the Fifth Session of the Eleventh National People's Congress on March 5, 2012 and adopted on March 14, 2012:

Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao delivers a government work report during the opening meeting of the Fifth Session of the 11th National People's Congress (NPC) at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, March 5, 2012. [Photo/Xinhua]

Fellow Deputies,

On behalf of the State Council, I now present to you my report on the work of the government for your deliberation and approval and for comments and suggestions from the members of the National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC).

I. Review of Work in 2011

Last year, China faced a complex and volatile political and economic environment abroad and arduous and challenging reform and development tasks at home. Working hard with one heart and one mind under the leadership of the Communist Party of China (CPC), the Chinese people of all ethnic groups made significant achievements in reform, opening up, and socialist modernization. China's GDP reached 47.2 trillion yuan, an increase of 9.2% over the previous year; government revenue was 10.37 trillion yuan, an increase of 24.8%; and the country's grain output reached a record high of 571.21 million tons. A total of 12.21 million new urban jobs were created. The per capita disposable income of urban residents and the per capita net income of rural residents rose in real terms by 8.4% and 11.4%, respectively. We consolidated and built upon our achievements in responding to the global financial crisis, and got the Twelfth Five-Year Plan period off to a good start.

We accomplished the following in our work last year.

1. Strengthening and improving macro-control, preventing fast price rises, and achieving steady and robust economic development

We followed a proactive fiscal policy and a prudent monetary policy, and maintained a balance between ensuring steady and robust economic development, adjusting the economic structure, and managing inflation expectations. We paid greater attention to implementing policies with the proper focus, force, and pace; conducted prudent and flexible macro-control on a moderate scale and in a timely fashion; and constantly made our policies more targeted, flexible, and forward-looking. Amid worsening inflation expectations worldwide, fluctuating and high prices of major commodities on the world market, significantly higher costs of factors of production at home, and a shortage of some agricultural products, we made ensuring general price stability our top priority in macro-control, pursued policies in an integrated way, rationally used monetary policy tools to regulate the supplies of money and credit, vigorously developed production to ensure supply, boosted distribution, and strengthened supervision. As a result, increases in the consumer price index (CPI) and the producer price index (PPI) began falling in August, thus reversing the trend of rapid inflation. In the second half of the year, when the global economy faced greater instability and uncertainty and when new developments and problems occurred in China's economy, we kept the basic orientation of macro-control unchanged, maintained the basic continuity of our macroeconomic policies, and continued to curb inflation. In addition, we carried out timely and appropriate anticipatory adjustments and fine-tuning, strengthened coordination between credit and industrial policies, and increased structural tax reductions. We focused on supporting the real economy, especially small and micro businesses; improving the people's wellbeing, especially by building low-income housing projects; and ensuring funding for key projects that are under construction or expansion. These well-targeted measures were taken to solve major economic problems. We steadfastly tightened regulation of the real estate market and ensured that control policies were fully carried out and achieved real progress. Consequently, speculative or investment-driven housing demand has been significantly curbed, housing prices in most Chinese cities have fallen month on month, and the results of our control measures are beginning to show. We attached great importance to guarding against and eliminating latent risks which exist in the banking and public finance sectors. We fully audited local government debt in a timely manner, and obtained a clear picture of the total amount, due dates, geographic distribution, and causes of the debts local governments incurred over the years. These debts have played a positive role in promoting economic and social development and produced a large amount of quality assets. However, they also contained risks and hidden dangers, and some localities with poor ability to pay their debts were at risk of default. We sorted out and standardized these debts, imposed a cap on their increase, and actively yet prudently solved problems related to the repayment of such debts and additional funding for ongoing projects. Government debt in China now is at a controllable and secure level. China's economy as a whole continues to grow as we anticipated in our exercise of macro-controls and has become more resilient. Economic growth is robust, prices are stabilizing, economic returns are good, and the people's wellbeing is improving.

2. Accelerating the transformation of the pattern of economic development and making development more coordinated and industries more competitive

We supported development in some areas while limiting growth in others, and carried out economic structural adjustments and upgrading to increase the sustainability of development.

We consolidated and strengthened the agricultural foundation. We fully implemented the policy of strengthening agriculture, benefitting farmers, and enriching rural areas. We increased subsidies for agricultural production, and the minimum purchase price for grain rose steadily. We strengthened agricultural and rural infrastructure, with priority given to irrigation and water conservancy projects, improved rural land, increased scientific and technological services for agriculture, and improved our ability to respond to and mitigate natural disasters. Central government spending on agriculture, rural areas and farmers exceeded one trillion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 183.9 billion yuan. We had a bumper harvest in all sectors of agriculture. China's grain output increased for the eighth consecutive year, which has rarely been seen in history. Grain output in each of the past five years has exceeded 500 million tons, which shows that China's overall grain production capacity has reached a new level. We continued to renovate dilapidated houses in rural areas, ensured the safety of potable water for 63.98 million additional rural residents, delivered electricity to 600,000 people in areas that had no power supply, and further improved rural working and living conditions.

We accelerated the optimization and upgrading of the industrial structure. We energetically fostered strategic emerging industries and accelerated development of new energy, new materials, biomedicines, high-end equipment manufacturing and new-energy vehicles, and we sped up pilot projects and demonstrations for integrating the telecommunications network, the radio and television broadcasting network, and the Internet, along with the development of cloud computing and the Internet of Things. We made progress in enterprise mergers and reorganizations. We allocated 15 billion yuan from the central government budget to support more than 4,000 projects to boost key industries and upgrade their technologies. This seed capital attracted a total investment of 300 billion yuan. We accelerated the development of information consulting, e-commerce and other modern service industries, and expanded new service areas. The transportation industry developed quickly, thereby further strengthening the foundation for China's economic and social development.

We made progress in conserving energy, reducing emissions, and protecting the ecological environment. We adopted and implemented the Comprehensive Work Plan for Conserving Energy and Reducing Emissions and the Work Plan for Controlling Greenhouse Gas Emissions for the Twelfth Five-Year Plan period, and the Guidelines on Strengthening Key Environmental Protection Tasks. The installed power capacity using clean energy reached 290 million kW, an increase of 33.56 million kW over the previous year. We strengthened the development of major energy conservation and environmental protection projects. We increased daily sewage treatment capacity by 11 million tons in urban areas, and installed desulphurization systems on all new coal-fired power-generating units with a total capacity of over 50 million kW. We tightened controls over industries that are energy intensive, have high emissions or possess excess production capacity, and closed down outdated production facilities whose production capacity amounted to 150 million tons of cement, 31.22 million tons of iron, and 19.25 million tons of coke. We implemented the second phase of the project to protect virgin forests and raised related subsidies, carried out the policy of giving rewards and subsidies for grassland ecological conservation, and launched pilot projects to protect the ecological environment of lakes. And we planted 6.13 million hectares of trees.

We promoted the balanced development of regional economies. We thoroughly implemented the master strategy for regional development and the national plan for developing functional zones. We introduced preferential policies to promote the leapfrog development of Tibet and Xinjiang; and formulated and implemented a rural poverty alleviation and development program for the next ten years and an action plan to bring prosperity to border areas and the people there. As a result, regional development became better balanced, major economic indicators rose faster in the central and western regions and northeast China than the national average, and the eastern region accelerated industrial transformation and upgrading. China's urbanization level exceeded 50%, marking a historic change in the country's social structure. We completed reconstruction in Wenchuan, Sichuan, which was hit by a massive earthquake in 2008, and made major progress in disaster relief and reconstruction in Yushu, Qinghai; Zhugqu, Gansu; and Yingjiang, Yunnan.