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.

Environmental protection and energy conservation have earned an higher profile from government leaders in recent years as it has become evident that China’s economy is devouring its resources and polluting its land and air. The most recent five-year plan calls for a 20 percent reduction in energy consumption per unit of gross domestic product.

But Mr. Wen acknowledged that China had already failed to meet the reduction goals in the first year of that program. It also failed to meet a goal of reducing the overall discharge （流出） of pollutants by 2 percent last year, he said.

He blamed the setbacks（阻礙） on the slow pace of industrial restructuring, the growth of heavy industry and the failure of some local governments to abide by environmental laws.

Mr. Wen spent little time discussing the usually volatile（不穩定的） issue of Taiwan and placed only passing emphasis on the country’s military modernization efforts. He did not mention this year’s large 17.8 percent increase in military spending, but said the People’s Liberation Army was in the midst of changes to transform it into a force capable of fighting the high-tech wars of the 21st century.

He called for continued overhauls（檢查） of banking, currency valuation and the financial sectors（部門） and also addressed the trade issues that have become so contentious（爭吵） in the United States. “We must optimize（最優化） the mix of imports and exports, change the pattern of China’s foreign trade growth and strive to reduce our excessively large trade surplus,” he said.