Focus on quality, not quantity

The quality of development rather than just the quantity will be given priority by the nation's top economic planner, the National Development and Reform Commission, a spokesperson recently announced.

In the past, both the central and local governments have vowed to reduce the weight given to the growth of gross domestic product in officials' performance evaluations and give more importance to the environmental protection efforts they have made. However, no satisfactory results have been achieved.

For example, some officials in Zhengzhou, capital of Central China's Henan province, were recently appraised as excellent even though the city's environmental protection was assessed as poor. The reason is that in the performance evaluations of Zhengzhou's officials, environmental protection accounts for only 16 percent, while economic development accounts for 50 percent.