Chinese Premier Focuses on Pollution and the Poor

Prime Minister Wen Jiabao conceded Monday that China was failing on important energy and pollution goals and declared that the country must become more energy-efficient and quickly improve environmental protection to safeguard the long-term health of its booming economy.
Mr. Wen, making China’s equivalent of the State of the Union address(國情咨文), also pledged more government spending on education and health care, particularly for poorer residents in rural areas
His nationally televised speech, which opened the annual gathering of the National People’s Congress in Beijing, was generally short on specifics but emphasized past themes like social equality and the need to reduce the income gap between rural and urban residents.
Mr. Wen has spoken before about the importance of environmental protection, but he gave the issue greater emphasis in his speech, describing plans to shut down “backward” steel and iron foundries((鑄造廠） and inefficient, polluting power plants. He said development projects would have to meet national environmental standards and vowed（發誓） that China must “bring pollution under control.”
“We must make conserving energy, decreasing energy consumption, protecting the environment and using land intensively the breakthrough point and main fulcrum（支點） for changing the pattern of economic growth,” Mr. Wen told the opening session of the Communist Party-controlled national legislature.

Yet the difficulty of recalibrating（重新核準） China’s soaring economy was also evident（明顯的） in Mr. Wen’s remarks. Economic growth reached 10.7 percent last year, and while Mr. Wen predicted a more modest 8 percent growth rate for 2007, he acknowledged that such projections（預測,推測;估） are merely goals for budgeting purposes. China has repeatedly exceeded growth projections in recent years, and the government has struggled to keep a lid（限制） on the economy.

Mr. Wen described serious structural problems in the economy, but he emphasized that nothing was more important than maintaining the nation’s boom, which many experts consider essential to the Communist Party’s continued rule.