Outgoing Chinese Premier Wen Made His Last Official Speech to the NPC

At the Great Hall of the People in Tiananmen Square in the Chinese capital Beijing, the outgoing Premier of China, Wen Jiabao delivered his last work report. The Premier opened the National People’s Congress (NPC). Premier Wen called for unity and hard work for a prosperous and rejuvenated China. Premier Wen Jiaabo will be replaced by Lie Keqiang.

Government work report highlights

Premier Wen’s farewell speech left the incoming government officials with the challenges to resolve graft and corruption, lessen the gap between the rich and the poor, and put an end to pollution.

The outgoing Chinese official announced that this year, nine million jobs are going to be created for the Chinese populace. Other targets specified in his report are: less than 4.6% urban unemployment; a stable consumer price inflation at around 3.5%; and 7.5% annual economic growth for the year 2013.

The Premier also stressed that the “economic disparities between individuals” as well as the huge gap in opportunities for growth between migrant workers and those living in urban centers are the main challenges that China is facing today. The unequal distribution, according to him, needs to be the priority problem addressed by the Chinese government this year. Every kind of reform to this current system would further increase the economic boom that the Chinese nation has been enjoying in the past decade.

Shortcomings

The Party’s staunchest critics point to a number of shortcomings in the leadership that includes the two top officials who are stepping down. The critic primarily attributes the failures to corruption, the lack of checks on power, and limited press freedom as well. Despite concrete measures to help the poor (education for children in the rural areas, and lower taxes on agriculture) the outgoing officials are deemed to have failed on inciting concrete reforms as they have claimed they would do.

New government appointments

Chinese officials are tasked to assign a President who will oversee the running of the government and lead them to identifying their priory programs for 2013. The outgoing President Hu Jintao will step down to make way for the new President, Xi Jinping who has been serving the Communist Party’s General Secretary since November 2012. Now that China is at a crossroads according to many experts the choice of leaders and the programs that they will prioritize is critical to the immediate future of the country and will bear a huge impact on the state of the economy.

The kind of leadership that China needs

In a recently delivered speech, the new President Xi Jinping expressed some of his views on the kind of leadership that China needs right now. The need to learn and improve has been stressed, and he said that it is incumbent upon Chinese leaders to be open to sharpening and renewing the Communist Party and its individual members. And since China is now playing a huge role worldwide, he reiterates that it needs to show the rest of the world that is it is strong both domestically and internationally. Xi calls for less bureaucracy and less “pointless formalism.”