The meeting was planned to be a series of closed-door brainstorm sessions on challenging issues in the nation's social and economic reform, and most importantly to draw up the development roadmap for the next half of this year, according to officials from the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), which organized the event.

Participants included officials in charge of reform, commerce and monitoring of market prices from the provincial level.

The five-day brainstorm series is "an annual event for mid-year stock taking," said commission press officer Zhou Qing. But the meeting is expected to take three more days this year than in the past, due to the particularly long agenda, she said.

The usual mid-year stock-taking conference would take only two days, she said, with all the discussions held in Beijing.

The 2006 agenda for the Beidaihe meeting, according to the officer, covers several aspects of reform, including how to slow down economic growth when some economists say it is already over-heating, how to curb the land and credit supplies that have been fuelling a nearly unbridled rise in property investment and related prices, how to raise energy efficiency, how to balance income distribution, and how to reform the government system.

However, the tough part of this year's meeting is not to design solutions, but to "unify thinking," according to another NDRC official who does not wish to have his name disclosed.

Provincial officials are expected to seek an agreement with the central government on the evaluation of the economic situation, particularly on the general line to be taken to deal with the nearly frenzied investment growth.

"We have already introduced several batches of measures in economic control since 2003," said the NDRC official, a specialist in the monitoring of fixed asset investment. "But more often than not, they got ignored or became distorted at the local level."

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