Chinese Vice Premier Zeng Peiyan on Sunday hailed the achievements China has made since 1978 when the country launched the reform and opening up drive, saying that China has witnessed extensive and fundamental changes in its economic and social fields.
While delivering a keynote speech at the opening of the China-ASEAN Business and Investment Summit held in Nanning, capital of the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, Zeng cited that China's annual GDP growth averaged 9.7 percent from 1978 to 2006.
He noted, the country's total trade volume increased from 20.6 billion US dollars to 1.76 trillion US dollars during the same period.
Zeng said that since the beginning of this year, China's economy has maintained a steady and rapid development, especially in the sectors of agriculture, industry, investment, consumption and foreign trade, adding, "Enterprises yielded growing profits, governments reported rises in financial revenues, and urban and rural people got a greater income, and all grew by a large margin."
He stressed that product quality, especially food safety, has greatly improved.
However, the vice premier said, "we should keep a sober mind and realize that problems have remained in our economy, which are unreasonably faster economic growth, rising pressure on resources and the environment, excessive capital liquidity, fast food price hikes and imperfect economic system."
"We have given great attention to these problems and are taking measures to solve them," Zeng said.
He particularly mentioned the 17th National Congress of the Communist Party of China which concluded just a week ago. "It was a very important congress at the crucial stage of China's reform and opening up," Zeng said.
"Looking into the future, we will stick to the socialist road with Chinese characteristics, continue to emancipate the mind, persist in reform and opening up, step up scientific progress, promote social harmony and quadruple the per capita GDP of the year2000 by 2020," the vice premier said.
Zeng said China's development could not be achieved without cooperation with the rest of the world and the world could not make its progress without China's involvement.
He called for Chinese enterprises to better coordinate their efforts to "absorb foreign investment" and "go global" in the national drive to open wider to the outside world.
It is important to take the strategy of free trade zones and strengthen bilateral and multilateral trade and economic cooperation so as to promote common development of the region, Zen stressed.
"We will expand market access according to general international economic and trade practice, protect the legitimate rights and benefits of our partners according to law, and deal with business disputes through negotiations so that all parties in the win-win cooperation will gain," he said.
Source: Xinhua
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