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Premier Wen Jiabao said in Beijing Tuesday that he had lots of
figures which make him both happy and worried, pointing to China's
fast GDP growth as well as the slow increase of farmers' income,
rising unemployment, lingering poverty and east-west disparity in
development.
Relevant figures were all stored in his brain, dubbed as "a
computer" by some western diplomats, Wen said at a press
conference.
China has a huge labor force of 740 million, while the combined
labor force for developed countries in Europe and North America is
just 430 million, Wen noted.
Meanwhile, each year China sees the increase of some 10 million new
urban labor, and the country's laid-off and jobless people now
total nearly 14 million, he said.
The size of rural migrant workers in cities is regularly kept at
around 120 million, putting China under immense employment
pressure, he added.
Some 900 million of China's total 1.3 billion population live in
the countryside, and 30 million of them still live under the
poverty line.
"If the benchmark for the poverty line is raised by 200 yuan, the
number of Chinese people living in extreme poverty will surge to 90
million," he added.
In
a display of the widening gap between China's east and west, some
five to six provinces and cities have contributed more than 50
percent of the country's GDP (gross domestic product), Wen pointed
out.
"These figures make me worry," he said.
However, he said there are also some statistics which make him feel
happy.
These figures include an average GDP growth of more than 9 percent
in the past two decades and more, as well as a whopping foreign
exchange reserve of some US$300 billion, he said.
(Xinhua News Agency March 18, 2003)
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