Wen promises steps to reduce income disparities

Premier Wen Jiabao held a live chat with Chinese internet savvy "netizens", promising steps to reduce growing income disparities, bring down spiralling prices and provide affordable housing.Ensuring that fair income distribution will be an important task of the government as it has direct bearing on social justice and fairness as well as social stability, Wen said replying to questions Sunday just few hours before protest gatherings called by dissidents abroad.During the past two years Wen began holding annual live chat with netizens ahead of the session of the country's legislature, National People's Congress, (NPC), which is scheduled to hold its session early next month.This year's chat took place hours ahead of scheduled "protests" called by overseas dissident group on an internet website.
Similar calls last week evoked gatherings of people in Beijing and Shanghai and official media spoke of some arrests.The website Buxon.com called for "strolling" protests in 18 cities Sunday and Chinese police have made elaborate security measures to deal with them, including cautioning foreign media about rules governing coverage in China.

Wen said the government is striving to ensure that people lead a comfortable life with security and confidence in the new five year plan starting this year.
China's development blueprint for the coming five years will place high emphasis on the efforts to improve people's livelihood, he said speaking on the live chat conducted by official Xinhua news agency.


To enhance people's living standards is "our work's starting point as well as the final aim," he said.Greater efforts will be made to boost social development and progress, especially in those key sectors and aspects concerning national development and mass interests, the premier said.In order to focus on livelihood issues, the government is going to focus less on GDP and more on improving peoples incomes, he said.

The government is to set its annual gross domestic product (GDP) growth target for the 2011-2015 period at seven per cent, much below the last years GDP growth rate of over 10 per cent.This is to highlight the need to raise the quality of growth and improve the living standards of the people.The target was lower than the 7.5 percent for the previous five years.“We'll never seek high economic growth rate and big size at the price of environment, as that would result in unsustainable growth featuring industrial overcapacity and intensive resource consumption," Wen said.


The central government would adopt new performance evaluation criteria for local governments and give more weightage to efficiency, environment protection and the people's living standards, he said.China's rise lies in talents and education, not gross domestic product (GDP), he said."The whole world is talking about China's rise, and what the people talk about most is (China's) GDP. But I think China's rise lies in talents and education," he said.He said he attaches greater importance to two other figures: the proportion of education expenditure in GDP and the proportion of scientific RandD expenditure in production."That concerns our nation's future," he said.He also said an important aspect for China's higher-learning education reform is to encourage students' creative spirit and independent thinking, in a bid to foster more high-caliber talents.More than six million students graduate from universities in China every year.He said the country will build more high-quality rural schools and take measures to make the nine-year compulsory education in cities more accessible to migrant workers' children.


The Cabinet, would discuss a plan to raise the threshold of personal income tax.
The plan, if implemented, would benefit China's whole medium and low-income groups, Wen said while answering a netizen' online question about tax payment.

The plan would be delivered later to the National People's Congress, the country's top legislature, for review, he said.He reiterated his determination to tame the country's runaway housing prices and promised to control the inflation which during the previous months reached 5.1 per cent.According to latest figures, the inflation was stated to be around 4.9 per cent.To curb the rising inflation, China has announced to shift to prudent monetary policy in 2011 from previous moderately loose monetary policy.He also promised steps to reduce energy consumption per unit of gross domestic product (GDP) by 16 to 17 per cent by 2015 from 2011 levels.