Wen Preoccupied with Rural Areas, Unemployment, Poverty

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Last updated at: (Beijing Time) Tuesday, March 18, 2003

Wen Preoccupied with Rural Areas, Unemployment, Poverty

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Premier Wen Jiabao said Tuesday that he had lots of figures which make him both happy and worried, pointing to China's fast GDP growth as well as the slow increase of farmers' income, rising unemployment, lingering poverty and east-west disparity in development.

Relevant figures were all stored in his brain, dubbed as "a computer" by some western diplomats, Wen said at a press conference.

China has a huge labor force of 740 million, while the combined labor force for developed countries in Europe and North America is just 430 million, Wen noted.

Meanwhile, each year China sees the increase of some 10 million new urban labor, and the country's laid-off and jobless people now total nearly 14 million, he said.

The size of rural migrant workers in cities is regularly kept at around 120 million, putting China under immense employment pressure, he added.

Some 900 million of China's total 1.3 billion population live in the countryside, and 30 million of them still live under the poverty line.

"If the benchmark for the poverty line is raised by 200 yuan, the number of Chinese people living in extreme poverty will surge to 90 million," he added.

In a display of the widening gap between China's east and west,some five to six provinces and cities have contributed more than 50 percent of the country's GDP (gross domestic product), Wen pointed out.

"These figures make me worry," he said.

However, he said there are also some statistics which make him feel happy.

These figures include an average GDP growth of more than 9 percent in the past two decades and more, as well as a whopping foreign exchange reserve of some 300 billion US dollars, he said.

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