BEIJING – China faces a tough task to achieve about 7% economic growth in 2015, but the world’s second largest economy will still post “strong growth” while reforming its economic structure and streamlining government, China’s Premier Li Keqiang said Sunday.
“It will be by no means easy” to achieve the GDP target, China’s slowest rate for a quarter century, but the figure reflects a “new normal” of seeking better quality growth and a “more solid foundation to achieve economic modernization”, Li said at a press conference to close the brief annual session of China’s legislature, the National People’s Congress (NPC).
7% growth, in an economy he valued at $ 10 trillion, is “equivalent to the total economic size of a medium-size country,” and contributes to global economic growth, Li said. Despite widespread worries about government debt in China, Li said China was fully capable of preventing systemic and regional financial risks.
With the USA, China seeks to “build a new model of major country relationship featuring mutual respect and no conflict and no confrontation,” he said. The state visit of Chinese President Xi Jinping in September, and a bilateral investment treaty under negotiation, will boost ties between the world’s largest developed and developing countries, he said.
Although China ranks as the world’s second largest economy, the more important figure is per capita GDP, where China lies behind about 80 other nations, said Li. A recent visit to poor families in Western China had “pained his heart.” He noted the World Bank estimates that 200 million Chinese still live in poverty.
Beijing is not getting a “free ride” internationally, but instead pursues its peaceful foreign policy while “assuming greater due international obligations and responsibilities,” said Li, who followed Chinese government policy in declining to criticize Russia’s actions in Ukraine.
Li took journalists’ questions at the close of the largely rubber-stamp NPC, which met for 11 days in Beijing’s Great Hall of the People beside Tiananmen Square. The Chinese Premier bookends the highly orchestrated session enby giving a State of the Union-style speech on its first day, then holding a rare press conference on its last.
While Western leaders such as U.S. President Barack Obama regularly face the press, and unscripted questions, China’s still closed system of government shields its senior officials from media scrutiny, and tightly controls Chinese media. Sunday was Li’s only scheduled press conference all year. President Xi likewise rarely faces the media.
The two-hour session, of mostly pre-screened questions, is a key ritual at the often ceremonial NPC, but did highlight several themes raised by the 3,000 hand-picked delegates to the NPC. On the nation’s choking smog, Li vowed tougher measures against polluting firms and admitted “the progress we have made still falls far short of the expectations of the people.”
The fight against official corruption, where “no one is above the law”, will continue, said Li, although he offered no news on the most closely watched case of Zhou Yongkang, the highest ranking official to be snared in Xi’s campaign against graft. One dramatic graft case broke Sunday, when Qiu He, a senior Party official and media star in southwest China’s Yunnan province, was put under investigation for breaking the law and violating Party discipline, state news agency Xinhua announced in a statement just after Li’s press conference. Just the day before, Qiu had appeared at an NPC meeting, and was on the cover of the Yunnan Daily newspaper Sunday.
China will allow more public oversight of officials, set up an accountability system, said Li, but his rhetoric did not convince some watching citizens, as China’s Communist Party-led government refuses to allow independent supervision.
“It’s inconceivable to let a drug user control his addiction, but more interesting is how you let a drug user supervise the drugs, that’s my feeling towards the party’s anti-corruption (fight)”, wrote Beijing high school teacher Xu Xiancheng on Sina Weibo, a Twitter-like microblogging platform.
Li promised to streamline government administration by simplifying and cutting the number of necessary government approvals, and said he would make it easier for entrepreneurs to bring their ideas to the market. Reforming the government “is not like clipping nails but like taking a knife to one’s own flesh,” but China will persevere to get the job done, said Li.
On China’s “one child” policy, many delegates to the NPC had raised proposals calling for China to expand the recent relaxation of family planning to allow all couples to have two children. Li said Sunday that further change must await a government review of the recent reform that allows couples to have two children even if just one of the parents is a single child. Parents where both are single children have long been allowed two offspring.
Contributing: Sunny Yang
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