Full Text: Report on the Work of the Government(8)

IV. Balancing Steady Economic Growth and Structural Improvement

Steady growth and structural adjustment complement each other. We must work hard to ensure that the economy performs within an appropriate range while promoting economic transformation and upgrading, and maintaining sustainable economic growth.

We will move faster to foster growth areas of consumption.

We will encourage private consumption and curb spending on official overseas visits, official vehicles, and official hospitality. We will promote consumption in elderly care, domestic services, and health services, help strengthen spending on information goods and services, raise consumer spending on leisure and tourism, give impetus to green consumption, keep housing consumption stable, and encourage people to spend more on education, culture, and sports.

We will press ahead with the nationwide project to deliver telecoms, radio, television, and Internet service over a single broadband connection, accelerate the development of fiber-optic networks, significantly increase broadband speeds, develop logistics and express delivery services, and ensure that new forms of Internet-based spending, which combine online-offline activities, come to thrive.

We will strengthen monitoring, tracking, and recall systems to ensure the safety and quality of consumer goods, severely punish the production and sale of counterfeit and shoddy goods, and protect the legitimate rights and interests of consumers. In expanding consumption, we need to ensure every drop of spending builds to create a mighty river, so that the potential contained in an ocean of private consumers will be channeled into a powerful force driving economic growth.

We will increase effective investment in public goods.

We will ensure that the projects set out in the 12th Five-Year Plan are completed. We will launch a number of major new projects, including:

-- projects for rebuilding rundown urban areas and renovating dilapidated housing, urban underground pipe network projects, and other projects to improve living standards;

-- major railway, highway, and inland waterway transport projects in the central and western regions;

-- agricultural projects on water conservancy and developing high-quality farmland;

-- projects that involve major information, electricity, oil, and natural gas networks;

-- clean energy projects, and oil, natural gas, and mineral resource supply projects;

-- projects for upgrading traditional industries; and

-- energy-saving, environmental protection, and ecological conservation projects.

This year, the central government will increase its budgetary investment to 477.6 billion yuan. However, the government does not intend to perform an investment soliloquy; we need to do more to stimulate private investment and channel the investment of nongovernmental capital into more areas.

We will keep our investment in railway construction above 800 billion yuan and open over 8,000 kilometers of railways to traffic. We will work to ensure that drive-through electronic toll collection systems are connected up on expressways throughout the country, and work toward making transportation truly lead the way in promoting development. Construction on the 57 ongoing major water conservancy projects needs to be accelerated; construction will be started on an additional 27 such projects this year, and investment in the major water conservancy projects under construction will exceed 800 billion yuan. Investment to be made in the above sectors, such as railways, water conservancy, and projects to rebuild rundown urban areas, will be weighted toward the central and western regions, helping stimulate enormous domestic demand.

We will work harder to modernize agriculture.

We will continue to give top priority to our work relating to agriculture, rural areas, and the rural population, speed up the transformation of the agricultural growth model, and ensure that agriculture is stronger, people in rural areas are better off, and rural China is more beautiful.

This year, we need to keep grain output above 550 million metric tons, and ensure both food security and the supply of major agricultural products. We will make sure that China' s arable land area does not fall below the red line of 120 million hectares. We will carry out work on designating permanent basic cropland throughout the country, launch an initiative to maintain and enhance the quality of cultivated land, improve rural land, improve the subsoil of 13.3 million hectares of cropland, strengthen the building of irrigation and water conservancy facilities, and work hard to develop water-efficient agriculture.

We will step up efforts to develop and expand the use of new technology, new crop varieties, and new agricultural machinery. We will guide farmers to adjust what and how much they grow or breed based on market demand. We will offer support for agricultural products to be processed locally, particularly for grain processing in major grain-growing areas, and carry out pilot projects to replace grain crop cultivation with feed crop cultivation. We will comprehensively address problems such as residual traces of chemicals in agricultural products and livestock shipments. We will work to improve the quality of all agricultural products and make our food more safe to eat.

Our efforts to build a new countryside should benefit the rural population. We will give high priority to building roads and water facilities. This year, we will ensure that 60 million more rural residents gain access to safe drinking water; that 200,000 kilometers of rural roads are built or upgraded; and that bridges are built to replace all ropeways in the western region. We will work toward providing electricity to the over 200,000 remaining people in China who are still without access.

We will strengthen efforts to improve the environment, focusing particularly on refuse and sewage treatment, to build a more beautiful and livable countryside. We will increase rural incomes through multiple channels and keep narrowing the urban-rural income gap.

We will continue to fight the battle against poverty, carry out extensive poverty alleviation and development programs in contiguous poor areas, and take targeted measures to help people lift themselves out of poverty. Regardless of how difficult it may be, this year, we must again reduce the poor rural population by more than 10 million.

Reform is key to modernizing agriculture. On the premise of keeping household operations stable, we will support the development of large family farming businesses, family farms and pastures, farmers' cooperatives, leading agricultural enterprises, and other emerging agribusinesses; cultivate a new type of skilled farmer; and develop diversified and scaled agricultural operations.

We will ensure smooth progress in determining, registering, and certifying contracted rural land-use rights. We will move prudently to carry out pilot reforms relating to rural land requisition, putting rural collective land designated for business-related construction on the market, the system of land use for rural housing, and the rural collective property rights system. We need to ensure that during reform, the acreage of cultivated land does not diminish, its quality does not deteriorate, and the interests of people in rural areas are protected.

We will deepen the reform of rural supply and marketing cooperatives, state farms on reclaimed land, the seed industry, state forestry farms, and state forests, and work to ensure the success of both experimental zones for carrying out rural reform and modern agriculture demonstration zones. We will refine the policy on setting minimum state grain purchase prices and the policy on the temporary state purchase and storage of major agricultural products, and improve the ways that subsidies are granted under the system of guaranteed base prices for agricultural products. We will strengthen the integration and management of funds for agricultural development. Whatever fiscal difficulties we may face, our policies to support agriculture must be strengthened, and related funding must be increased.

We will work to achieve breakthroughs in promoting a new type of urbanization.

Urbanization is a fundamental way to narrow the gap between urban and rural areas and provides the largest source of domestic demand. We will make urbanization people-oriented, focus on the three tasks,* and fully leverage the role of urbanization in underpinning modernization.

We will redouble efforts to rebuild rundown urban areas and renovate dilapidated urban and rural housing. This year, our plan includes building an additional 7.4 million units of government-subsidized housing, of which 5.8 million are to be located in rundown urban areas, an increase of 1.1 million over last year. We will bring the renovation of dilapidated urban housing under the coverage of the policy on rebuilding rundown areas. We will renovate 3.66 million dilapidated rural houses, an increase of one million over the number renovated last year. We will carry out coordinated work to make rural housing more earthquake resistant.

In providing government housing support, we will phase in the policy of using both the provision of physical housing and the allocation of housing subsidies, and transform a portion of available housing into public rental housing or housing to be sold to those being relocated. Housing allowances will be provided to families who live on subsistence allowances and are facing serious housing difficulties. We will give targeted guidance, implement policies suitable to local conditions, assign primary responsibility to local governments for the development of housing, support people' s demand for housing for personal use and second homes, and promote the stable and sound development of the real estate market.

*These tasks are:

-- grant urban residency to 100 million people who have moved to cities from rural areas;

-- rebuild rundown areas and "villages" within cities where 100 million people are currently living; and

-- guide the process of urbanization for 100 million people in the central and western regions.

We will draw on reform to solve tough issues in urbanization. We need to promptly implement reforms to the household registration system and relax controls over the transfer of household registration. People originally from rural areas who live and work in urban areas but have yet to gain urban residency will be able to access basic public services on the basis of their residence certificates, and we will get rid of fees related to residence certification. We will link the transfer payments of cities to their performance in granting urban residency to eligible migrant workers and find suitable ways to share the cost of ensuring migrant workers can become urban citizens. We will establish well-regulated, diversified, and sustainable mechanisms for financing urban development. We will continue to use land economically and intensively, establish a sound unified market for urban and rural land that may be used for construction purposes, and improve and expand pilot projects to link the amount of urban and rural land granted for these purposes to that of land returned to cultivation. We will increase funding and policy support for expanding trials in the new type of urbanization.

We will improve the planning, construction, and management of cities and towns. We need to formulate and implement plans for building city clusters, and work systematically to develop integrated infrastructure and basic public services within clusters. Standards for designating municipalities will be improved, trial programs will be launched to expand the powers of very large towns and increase their overall carrying capacity, and efforts will be made to bring population growth in megacities under control. We will also raise the industry and population carrying capacity of prefectural cities, county towns, and hub towns to make it easier for people from rural areas nearby to gain urban residency.

We will develop smart cities and protect historical and local culture, ensuring it is passed on from generation to generation. We will strengthen urban facilities for water, gas, and electricity supplies, public transport, and flood prevention and rainwater control. We will ensure the effective governance of urban maladies such as pollution and traffic congestion to make transportation more convenient and improve the environment for urban living.

We will expand space for promoting development in different regions.

We will pursue in a coordinated way the strategy of developing the western region, revitalizing the northeast, boosting the rise of the central region, and ensuring the eastern region takes the lead in development and the strategy of developing the Silk Road Economic Belt, the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road, the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region, and the Yangtze Economic Belt.