Tibet Accelerates Economic GrowthDeputies to the Regional People's Congress of Tibet vowed to narrow the gap between Tibet and other parts of China in the shortest possible time, and work hard toward the goal of common prosperity.The deputies attending the third session of the Seventh Congress of Tibet Autonomous Region agreed that the region should take the advantage of the national campaign to develop western China to speed up the region's infrastructure construction, highway building in particular. The highways to be constructed include those between China and Nepal, and between Tibet and Qinghai and Sichuan provinces and the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region. The region will open more air routes, expand water, thermal, and wind power production capacity, launch a telecommunications network, and make early preparations for the construction of the first railway in Tibet. During the current session, deputies reviewed development in infrastructure, education, non-public sector, and poverty elimination over the past year. Tibet invested 5.6 billion yuan in fixed assets last year, surpassing any previous year. Work on 50 key projects beginning last year are underway at a cost of 1.9 billion yuan, and twenty- one of them had been completed. By the end of 1999, the regional government had allocated 281 million yuan to build 129 aid-the-poor projects encompassing water conservancy, agriculture, animal husbandry, and transportation. As a result, the grain output of 18 poor areas in Tibet increased by 12.7 percent. The number of individual industrial and commercial firms in Tibet rose to 41,000, employing a total workforce of 60,000 by the end of last year. Also, the school enrollment rate increased to 83. 4 percent, and adult illiteracy dropped to 42 percent. |
| People's Daily Online --- http://www.peopledaily.com.cn/english/ |