SCIO press conference on 'China's Epic Journey from Poverty to Prosperity' white paper
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E-mail China.org.cn, September 30, 2021
Economic Daily:
In recent years, society has witnessed great changes in every aspect of people's lives. At the same time, we have noticed that people are still facing difficulties in housing, medical care, education, elderly care, and other areas. How do you see these problems, and how will you solve them? Thank you.
Zhao Chenxin:
I'll answer this question. Thanks for your question, which is a very important one. Our people are still facing some difficulties and having some appeals on several direct and practical areas. How should we see these problems, and how will we solve them?
The CPC has always placed ensuring and improving people's wellbeing as a top priority to achieving a moderately prosperous society in all respects and made constant efforts to solve prominent problems affecting the vital interests of the people. As a result, over 1.4 billion Chinese people have begun to live the happy lives that they have dreamed of for thousands of years. Their rights to subsistence and development have been effectively protected. Significant progress has been made in ensuring access to childcare, education, employment, housing, medical services, elderly care, and social assistance. However, ensuring and improving people's wellbeing has no end but only new starting points. We think that the difficulties you have mentioned in medical care, housing, education, and other areas are the pursuit of better doctors, better housing, better schools, and better lives. It is a question of whether the quality is good or not after the question of access has been properly solved, which relates to new worries in the new development stage of people's livelihoods. These problems show that after achieving a moderately prosperous society in all respects, the macro environment and internal conditions for improving people's wellbeing are facing new changes. People's needs for a better life have become more extensive since they have more and higher-level demands for steadily rising incomes, quality medical services, more equal education, and better living conditions. In the new development stage, we have to adapt to these new changes, adhere to a people-centered development philosophy and do our best to resolve pressing difficulties and problems that are of the greatest concern to the people, to resolve more prominent problems, and practically ensure people's livelihood.
In the aspect of public services, during the next five years, we will actively adapt to people's desire for a better life and focus on public issues that are most pressing, most practical, and of greatest concern of people's livelihood. We will define the scope of basic and non-basic public services in a scientific and reasonable way, continuously promote the equalization of basic public services, and expand the multiple and inclusive supply of non-basic public services. We will also mobilize multifaceted forces at the levels of government, society, market, and the individual to strengthen weak links and improve quality in order to achieve the final goal of pursuing better access to childcare, education, employment, housing, medical services, elderly care, and social assistance.
Next, we will promote the building of a public service system in two areas. First, governments will provide equal access to basic public services. We will focus on ensuring people's basic living needs and fulfilling the duties of governments at all levels of basic public service supply. We will effectively increase input, continuously improve the standard system, optimize resource allocation efficiency, and advance equal access to basic public services. By doing these, all citizens are expected to get fair and roughly equal basic public services so that the bottom line of people's livelihood can be guaranteed. Second, we will make efforts to expand the multiple and inclusive supply of non-basic public services. Governments should fulfill their guiding responsibilities to encourage and support public institutions, social organizations, the state-owned economy, and multiple subjects to participate in non-basic public service supply, enrich the service supply, and effectively reduce service costs. We will gradually make non-basic public services available after paying – at affordable prices – with guaranteed quality and supervised safety to achieve a dynamic balance between supply and demand and ensure inclusive public services.
By distinguishing basic and non-basic public services, we can clear rights and liabilities, highlight key points, utilize limited financial funds in the most needed and pressing areas of people's livelihoods, and collect more social resources for public services. As a result, we can fully mobilize all positive factors to effectively tackle pains and difficulties and remove barriers to people's livelihoods and meet the people's ever-growing needs for a better life, improving people's livelihoods in line with economic development to create a better life together. Thank you.
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