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Economy the focus as China political session ends
By CHARLES HUTZLER,Associated Press Writer -
Sunday, March 14
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BEIJING – China closed its annual legislative session Sunday by approving a budget that extends job-creation and welfare programs as Beijing tries to deal with a rapidly expanding rich-poor gap at the root of many of its social stability problems.
The National People's Congress, at the end of nearly two weeks of meetings, also passed an amendment to the election law to improve representation for rural areas. Previously, rural delegates represented four times as many people as their urban counterparts, but the amendment erases the distinction, an acknowledgment of the need to buttress the interests of the dwindling farming population.
China, the world's third-largest economy, escaped the worst of the global financial crisis by ordering $1.4 trillion in bank lending and government stimulus.
Although economic growth rebounded to 10.7 percent in the final quarter of 2009, authorities say the global outlook is still uncertain, amid worries that the torrent of lending is adding to inflation and fueling a dangerous bubble in stock and real estate prices.
Congress Chairman Wu Bangguo said job one was ensuring a balance between maintaining steady economic growth and furthering the overall restructuring of the economy away from exports and investment.
China must "integrate the resolution of the current problems with long-term development and make substantial steps in accelerating the transformation of the pattern of economic development," Wu, the Communist Party's second-highest ranking official, said in his address to the congress' closing ceremony at the Great Hall of the People in central Beijing.
Premier Wen Jiabao was expected to expand on China's domestic and international goals for the year during his annual televised news conference Sunday.
Government spending will be increased by 10 percent to fuel the economic recovery, with more money for low-cost housing, pensions, and other social programs for the country's 1.3 billion people.
The priorities extend Wen and President Hu Jintao's yearslong efforts to spread the benefits of economic growth more broadly across a rapidly changing society. This year, inflation is a looming challenge, with housing prices soaring and worrying rises in food prices that consume as much as 40 percent of household incomes.
The rich-poor gap is also growing and increasingly contentious, while millions of migrant workers and farmers go without basic government aid.
There were no surprises on the voting by the nearly 3,000 delegates. The government work report passed with 97.5 percent of the vote. Rising crime is a problem in China and delegates made their usual faint display of displeasure against that, with negative votes and abstentions counting for 21 percent of the vote on the reports from the Supreme People's Court and national prosecutor's office.
National and local legislatures in China generally adopt decisions made behind closed doors by Communist Party leaders, while the bulk of the congress' legislative work is handled by its standing committee.
This year's session _ the most public event the authoritarian government holds _ had the usual heavy police presence in Beijing, with dozens of political dissidents and human rights activists reportedly harassed or detained.
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