Voice from Seoul

Yonhap 05/03

The Chinese government was speeding up its economic transformation after the global financial crisis because it realised it could not overcome future crises with its current economic structure dominated by cheap exports. China should keep a balanced development of service sectors and agriculture, and nurture the domestic market, it said. Economic transformation would be one of the hot topics of this year's NPC, it said.

Although the Chinese economy was gradually recovering, China faced some serious problems, such as the widening urban-rural gap.

China recently focused on migrant workers, eyeing the new generation of migrant workers born in the 1990s, and would discuss the making of the medium- and long-term layout for migrant workers.

China's defense budget this year will rise by 7.5 percent from last year to some 532.12 billion yuan, the first time in 22 years that the increase rate dropped to the single digits. The reasons seem to be strain on the national budget in the aftermath of the global recession and suspicion from countries including the U.S., India and Japan about the steep increase in China's military expenditure over the last several years.

Yonhap news agency 03/03

The two sessions would take economic issues as its major topics, as the world is still staggering out of the global financial crisis. In addition, the Chinese government was seeking the transformation of the country's economic development mode.

The Korea Herald 03/03

The main goal of the two sessions was to set down measures on economic transformation, and the sessions would also deal with a series of social and political topics such as soaring housing prices, fighting corruption, public health care and educational reform.

Netizen: King Joezhun 01/03

I'm a Korean student who has been studying in China for three years. I noticed that every spring there would be much news about some meetings in Beijing. At the beginning I felt strange, why do they treat these meetings like a festival? By asking Chinese classmates and reading the news I was informed that these meetings are a kind of democracy institute in China. I'm glad that Chinese people have a way to have some influence on policy.