II. Main Tasks for 2010

This is a crucial year for continuing to deal with the global financial crisis, maintaining steady and rapid economic development, and accelerating the transformation of the pattern of economic development. It is also an important year for achieving all the targets of the Eleventh Five-Year Plan and laying a solid foundation for development on the basis of the Twelfth Five-Year Plan.

Although this year's development environment may be better than last year's, we still face a very complex situation. Some positive changes and negative influences are growing while others are diminishing. Short-term and long-term problems are interwoven, domestic and international factors mutually affect each other, and the dilemmas facing economic and social development are increasing. Internationally, the global economy will hopefully turn around. International financial markets are stabilizing, and the overall trend toward increased economic globalization has not changed. Considerable changes and adjustments in the world economic structure will bring new development opportunities. At the same time, many destabilizing factors and uncertainties remain in our external environment. The foundation for global economic recovery remains weak; financial risks have not been completely eliminated; individual countries face difficult choices in phasing out their stimulus policies; larger fluctuations may occur in the prices of major commodities and exchange rates among the major currencies; trade protectionism is clearly reasserting itself; and global problems such as climate change, food security and energy and resource supplies remain complex. Domestically, our country is still in an important period of strategic opportunities. The foundation for economic turnaround is becoming stronger, market confidence has increased, the policy we adopted to boost domestic demand and improve people's wellbeing continues to show results, and enterprises are constantly becoming more competitive and better able to adapt to market changes. Nevertheless, there are still some serious problems affecting economic and social development. There is insufficient internal impetus driving economic growth; our independent innovation capability is not strong; there is still considerable excess production capacity in some industries and it is becoming more difficult to restructure them; while the pressure on employment is constantly growing overall, there is a structural shortage of labor; the foundation for keeping agricultural production and farmers' incomes growing steadily is weak; latent risks in the banking and public finance sectors are increasing; and major problems in the areas of healthcare, education, housing, income distribution and public administration urgently require solutions. We must make a comprehensive and correct judgment of the situation, and we must not interpret the economic turnaround as a fundamental improvement in the economic situation. We need to strengthen our awareness of potential dangers, make full use of favorable conditions and positive factors, strive to resolve problems, make even more thorough preparations to deal with risks and challenges of all kinds, and firmly keep the initiative in our work.

To do a good job of our government work this year, we need to conscientiously implement the guiding principles of the Seventeenth National Party Congress and the third and fourth plenary sessions of the Seventeenth Central Committee; take Deng Xiaoping Theory and the important thought of Three Represents as our guide; thoroughly implement the Scientific Outlook on Development; strive to apply macro-control appropriately and maintain steady and rapid economic development; work hard to accelerate economic restructuring and the transformation of the pattern of economic development; press ahead with reform and opening up and with independent innovation; strive to improve people's wellbeing and to promote social harmony and stability; make headway with our efforts to encourage socialist economic, political, cultural, social, and ecological development; pick up the pace of building a moderately prosperous society in all respects; and work hard to achieve sound, rapid economic and social development.

This year the main targets we have set for economic and social development are: increasing GDP by approximately 8%, creating jobs for more than 9 million people entering the urban workforce, keeping the urban registered unemployment rate no higher than 4.6%, holding the rise in consumer prices to around 3%, and improving the balance of payments. Here I would like to stress that in targeting a GDP increase of around 8%, we are emphasizing sound development, and we need to guide all sectors to focus on transforming the pattern of economic development and restructuring the economy in their work. By targeting an increase in consumer prices of around 3%, we are giving full consideration to the carry-over effects of last year's price changes, the reverberations caused by price changes for major international commodities, the continued impact of increases in domestic supplies of money and credit, and consumers' ability to bear price increases, while also leaving room for reform in resource and environment taxes and fees and in the pricing of resource products.