China promises sweeping eco changes
China, one of the world’s biggest polluters, today promised sweeping environmental changes.
President Hu Jintao, outlining the communist party’s plans for the next five years, promised: “Ecological and environmental quality will improve notably.”
The president, who is the party’s general secretary, affirmed its main economic themes, promising to spread prosperity to the countryside, nurture high-tech industry and reduce reliance on exports by encouraging China’s own consumers to spend more.
He promised more reforms of China’s controversial currency controls and to narrow its swollen trade surplus but gave no details and mentioned no new market-opening or other initiatives.
He repeated party promises to quadruple China’s economic output per person from its 2000 level by 2020.
And he pledged to cut pollution, reflecting mounting worries about the environmental costs of a boom that have left China with some of the world’s dirtiest air and water.
Beijing will “promote a conservation culture by basically forming an energy- and resource-efficient and environmentally friendly structure of industries, pattern of growth and mode of consumption,” the president told delegates gathered in the Great Hall of the People in central Beijing.
The party also will “accelerate the growth of Chinese multinational corporations and Chinese brand names in the world market,” he said.
He promised to spend more to raise living standards in China’s vast countryside and for the urban poor, acknowledging the country faces a growing gap between those who have benefited most from economic reform and the impoverished majority.
“Rural areas still lag behind in development,” he said.
The president promised to pursue “basic equilibrium in the balance of payments” – a reference to China’s swollen trade surplus – while giving no details.
He also promised more reform of controversial controls on China’s currency. But he gave no indication that Beijing might yield to demands by the US and other trading partners to let the yuan’s value rise more quickly.
Washington and other governments say Beijing keeps the yuan undervalued, giving its exporters an unfair advantage and adding to its swollen trade surplus.
