Premier focuses on people's well-being in policy briefing
By (Xinhua)
Updated: 2004-03-05 09:46

Briefing the national legislature Friday on government policies for 2004, Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao laid stress on issues relating directly to the welfare of the country's 1.3 billion people, pledging higher rural incomes, more urban jobs and enhanced public safety.

"All power of the government is bestowed by the people, so the government must be accountable to the people, act in their interests and accept their oversight," said Wen in an annual duty report of his cabinet, the first in its five-year term, to a full session of the National People's Congress (NPC), or the China version of a parliament.

Nearly 3,000 lawmakers, or NPC deputies as they are formally called, gathered at the Great Hall of the People in downtown Beijing Friday morning to hear Wen's 31-page report, whose printed copies were released to the press prior to the opening of the 10-day parliamentary session at 9 o'clock Beijing Time.

Announcing a major decision of his administration, Wen said the agricultural tax on the country's 900 million farmers, which has been collected by successive Chinese rulers for thousands of years, would be rescinded in five years, with the current tax rate being reduced by more than 1 percentage point a year on average beginning this year.

The legislators, many from the countryside, welcomed this announcement with a storm of applause.

Official statistics show that in 2003 the per capita income of China's rural residents stood at 2,622 yuan (316 dollars), less than one third of that of the urban dwellers.

In a conspicuous display of his government's determination to tackle the farmers issue, Wen, in an independent paragraph in his report, vowed to "basically solve the problem of wage arrears for migrant rural workers in the construction industry within three years", adding that the clearing-up should "begin with government- invested projects".

According to estimates by scholars with the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences at the end of 2003, at least 100 billion yuan (12 billion dollars) was owed in back wages to the country's some 85 million rural migrant laborers.

In his report, the premier said his government planned to create 14 million jobs in cities and towns in 2004, 9 million for the new urban workforce including an increasing number of university and college graduates, and 5 million for workers laid off from loss-suffering State-owned enterprises.

In 2003, China offered 8.59 million jobs to new urban labor and also helped 4.4 million laid-off workers get employed again. Nevertheless, the country's registered urban unemployment rate climbed to 4.3 percent, up 0.3 percentage points over 2002.

"Doing everything possible to create more jobs is one of the major responsibilities of the government," Wen told the legislators.

Acknowledging the people's rising concerns about public safety issues, the premier also proposed measures to drastically improve the country's existing public health system and to effectively check the frequent occurrence of major accidents that lead to heavy losses and casualties.

Last year's SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) outbreak, which the premier described as "disastrous" in his report, claimed 349 lives on the Chinese mainland and at the same time exposed loopholes in the country's public health system, such as a slow, inaccurate report of the epidemic and poor disease prevention facilities in the vast countryside.

"We will try to establish within three years a fully functioning system for disease prevention and control and for emergency medical aid that covers both urban and rural areas, in order to increase our ability to deal with serious epidemic diseases and other public health emergencies," said Wen.

Faced with soaring industrial and other accidents across the country, the premier made the commitment that his government would "speed up the establishment of emergency response mechanisms" and "tenaciously investigate all kinds of accidents and prosecute those responsible for them".

In the past couple of months, despite constant cautions and safety checks from the authorities, severe accidents like fire, mine blasts and stampede have taken place one after another in China, killing several hundred and injuring more.

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