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Jilin: Building wellbeing in an economic storm
By Yang Fan (China Daily)
Updated: 2009-01-20 07:43
With the goal of building a humane society, northeast China's Jilin province has taken tangible measures to improve people's livelihood while tackling the worst global economic recession in decades. In the city of Baishan in eastern Jilin province, steps taken to stimulate economic growth include implementation of 191 projects to improve people's lives and strengthen industries that have known advantages. Projects range from construction of roads, sewage treatment facilities, water supplies and tourism amenities to affordable houses for low-income families. To secure more jobs and maintain development, the local government of Tonghua in southeast Jilin is offering financial assistance to enterprises. Tonghua assisted 26 enterprises applying for 1.18 billion yuan in loans last year. Construction on 30 large infrastructure projects, with a total investment of 1.86 billion yuan, also began in 2008 that created a considerable number of jobs. To improve livelihood "We have based our work on the notion of a human-oriented harmonious society and tried our utmost to solve the issues that people are most concerned with so that the fruits of the economic growth can be shared by all people," said Wang Min, secretary of the Jilin Provincial Committee of the Communist Party of China. "Since 2006, the provincial government has promised to undertake eight new livelihood projects each year and we kept our promises, which have received a good public response."
The provincial government has also promised to allocate 70 percent of the increase in its revenue each year to livelihood projects. Responding to the nation's policy of stimulating the economy through investment in projects that provide jobs, the provincial government has mapped out 24.36 billion yuan worth of projects this year. One will provide additional housing through reconstruction and renovation of 6 million sq m of city slums and 2.2 million sq m of shacks surrounding the area's coal mines. Affordable rental homes with a total of 800,000 sq m will be built for urban families, with another 200,000 mud-and-grass houses in the countryside will also receive improvements. Another project aims to create 420,000 new jobs in urban areas and help more than 3 million rural laborers to find employment in cities. The government will also establish a system to aid those who have difficulty finding jobs and promises that each urban family will have at least one person employed. Free vocational training will be given to children of low-income families as well as rural migrant workers. The minimum social security benefit will increase to 150 yuan per capita monthly in the cities and 700 yuan per capita yearly in the countryside. The government will allocate 80 yuan to subsidize every person covered by the new rural cooperative medical care system and the urban basic medical care insurance system. Benefits to rural area People living in the rural areas are receiving more attention this year. Two hundred township public health centers will be renovated and all rural children will receive vaccines. The delayed wages of rural high school and primary school teachers will be compensated and 67 rural high school dormitories will be reconstructed and improved. Safe drinking water before unavailable to 970,000 rural residents will be piped to them this year.
A thousand "culture yards" will be set up in the countryside and 3,000 art performances will be provided to villagers without charge. Four hundred poverty-stricken villages and 80,000 villagers are expected to shake free from poverty this year. "We shall never wave in our determination to improve people's life, which is a starting point for all of our work," Wang said. "Although Jilin has achieved remarkable economic growth in the past years, we still have a long way to go before we build our home province into a modern, prosperous, harmonious and environmentally friendly society." More opportunities In face of the global financial crisis, the provincial government of Jilin has taken measures to stimulate market demand and support major enterprises to overcome the difficulty and the province's GDP increased by 16 percent last year. "The current global financial crisis is a chance as well as a challenge to us," Wang said. "We are sure to embrace more opportunities for a sustained and healthy overall development and bring more benefits to people by implementing these measures." He said the biggest challenge is how to further liberate people's minds and adopt new means of economic development. As the nation's industrial base for decades, Jilin is one of the provinces that most influenced by the planned economy. "Jilin has a superb industrial base, high-quality human resources and a huge potential in economic development," he said. "However, people here have relatively less spirit for entrepreneurship and market awareness compared with regions in southern China. We still have a lot of work to do in this aspect." He pointed out that Jilin is still a less developed region in China in spite of recent progress, "but people will not relax their struggle to achieve glorious goals". He said with the old Jilin industries beginning to revive, the province's GDP is expected to reach 1 trillion yuan in 2011, with per capita GDP reaching $4,000. A more affluent society benefiting all people will come into being in 2020, he said. |
