China has to pursue political reform to safeguard its economic health, Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao (溫家寶) said during a visit to the booming town of Shenzhen, Xinhua news agency reported.
Wen’s call for political reform lacked specifics, but his comments reflect broader worries that unless the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) embraces at least limited reforms to make officials more answerable, then corruption and abuses may erode the country’s economic prospects.
“Without the safeguarding of political restructuring, China may lose what it has already achieved through economic restructuring and the targets of its modernization drive might not be reached,” Wen was quoted by Xinhua as saying. “People’s democratic rights and legitimate rights must be guaranteed. People should be mobilized and organized to deal with, in accordance with the law, state, economic, social and cultural affairs.”
PHOTO: AFP
Wen said he also wants to “create conditions” to allow the people to criticize and supervise the government as a way to address “the problem of over-concentration of power with ineffective supervision.”
Wen has developed a reputation as the member of CCP leadership most sympathetic to relaxing some of the country’s top-down controls.
Wen will retire as premier in early 2013. He has used recent speeches and comments to indicate that he wants to spend his final years in office focused on improving social welfare, promoting more balanced and equitable economic growth, and addressing public discontent with the government.
In Shenzhen, a small village that has exploded into a city of 14 million people in the last three decades, Wen said the Shenzhen story showed that reforming and opening up to the outside world “is the only road to achieving national prosperity and the people’s happiness.”
“Regression and stagnation will not only end the achievements of the three-decade-old reform, the opening-up drive and the rare opportunity of development, but also suffocate the vitality of China’s socialist cause with her own characteristics,” the premier said.
The Ministry of Transportation and Communications yesterday inaugurated the Danjiang Bridge across the Tamsui River in New Taipei City, saying that the structure would be an architectural icon and traffic artery for Taiwan. Feted as a major engineering achievement, the Danjiang Bridge is 920m long, 211m tall at the top of its pylon, and is the longest single-pylon asymmetric cable-stayed bridge in the world, the government’s Web site for the structure said. It was designed by late Iraqi-British architect Zaha Hadid. The structure, with a maximum deck of 70m, accommodates road and light rail traffic, and affords a 200m navigation channel for boats,
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