THE ELEVENTH FIVE-YEAR PLAN (11-5 Plan)

The 5-year plans are the blueprint of China's social and economic future.


The 11th 5-year plan outline comprises 48 chapters in 14 articles.

Main targets of economic and social development

The draft outline has set forth main targets of economic and social development in the next five years.

- Smooth and steady operation of the macro-economy. Gross Domestic Product is to grow 7.5 percent annually to double the per capita GDP in 2000. Both urban employment and migrant agricultural laborers will increase 45 million. Registered urban unemployment will remain under 5 percent.

- Optimizing and upgrading industrial structure. Proportion of added value in service industry to GDP and that of new employment to total employment will grow by 3 and 4 percentage points respectively. R&D expenditure will increase to 2 percent of GDP.

- Considerably improving efficiency of resource use. Energy consumption per unit of GDP is to decrease by 20 percent. Water consumption per unit of industrial added value is to decline by 30 percent. Irrigation water use efficiency is to increase by 0.5. Industrial solid waste recycling and conserving rate is to grow 60 percent.

- Urban and rural development is to grow balanced with urbanization rate growing to 47 percent.

- Basic public service is to be greatly reinforced. People's average education is to increase to 9 years. Urban basic endowment insurance is to cover 223 million people. New rural cooperative medical care's coverage will reach over 80 percent.

- Sustainable development capacity will be boosted. The total population will be controlled under 1.36 billion. Arable land will be maintained at 120 million hectares. Main pollutant discharges will be reduced by 10 percent and forest coverage will reach 20 percent.

- Relatively complete market economic system

- People's living standard continues to improve. Urban resident per capita disposable income and rural resident per capita net income will grow by an annual rate of 5 percent respectively.

- Democratic and legal system construction and spiritual civilization construction will make new progress.

Building a new socialist countryside

The draft outline proposes to continue the basic strategy of overall planning of urban and rural economic and social development. While actively promoting urbanization, solid and steady progress will be made in building a new socialist countryside according to the requirement of advanced production, improved livelihood, a civilized social atmosphere, clean and tidy villages and democratic administration.

It proposes to stick to developing agricultural productivity as the primary task of building a new socialist countryside, maintaining grain production growth and increasing its production capability to around 500 million tons.

It also proposes to extend agricultural industrial chain to let farmers benefit more from the expansion of agricultural functions and develop farm produce processing, freshness preservation, storage, transportation and other services.

It suggests to accelerate implementation of rural water safety project, basically realize connection of all towns by asphalt (cement) roads, perfect rural power grid, basically connect all the villages with telephones and provide internet access in every town, complete rural healthcare and medical aid system, emphasize popularization and consolidation of nine-year compulsory education in rural areas and eliminate tuition and incidental fees for rural students during the compulsory education period.

The draft outline proposes to stick to the guideline of "giving more, taking less and being flexible" and speed up the construction of a long-term mechanism in promoting agriculture by industry and towns by cities.

Boosting optimization and upgrade of industrial structure

The draft outline proposes to adjust and optimize industrial structure, corporate structuring and industrial arrangement with increasing independent innovation as the core link so as to increase overall technological level and improve competitiveness of industry.

It requires the extension of high-tech industries from processing and assembling to independent research and development and advancement of independent innovation commercialization; a series of leading industries with core competence should be formed; a group of industrial bases with concentration effect and a batch of transnational high-tech companies should be established and a raft of brand names of proprietary rights should be raised.

The outline proposes to make breakthrough in core technologies, increase the level of development and design of key technologies and equipment, localization of core components, the manufacture and system integration. A stable, economical, clean and safe energy supply system must be built.

Speeding up service industry development

The draft outline insists on marketization, industrialization and socialization; scope expansion, scale increase, structure optimization, function reinforcement, market standardization and raising the proportion and level of service industry.

It proposes to add 17,000 kilometers of railway, of which passenger lines account for 7,000 kilometers; to increase total length of highway to 2.3 million kilometers, of which expressways account for 65,000 kilometers; to build Yangtze waterway and high-level navigation course networks in the Yangtze River Delta and Pearl River Delta etc.; to build international shipping centers in Shanghai, Tianjin and Dalian etc.

Promoting balanced regional development

The outline proposes to boost balanced regional development to gradually form development arrangement that has clear function positioning, virtuous interaction among the eastern, central and western regions, and narrows gap in public service and people's living standards.

The overall strategy for regional development the outline puts forward is advancing the western development, rejuvenating old industrial bases in northeast China, promoting the rise of the central region; and encouraging development of the east first.

It proposes to give overall planning to population distribution, economic deployment, land utilization and urbanization pattern in light of the carrying capacity of resources and environment, existing development density and potential, so as to classify the land space into four categories: optimized development, key development, restricted and banned development zones.