South China's Guangdong Province will go on developing its marine economy in a bid to boost the province's economic growth, said Zhang Dejiang, secretary of the Guangdong provincial committee of the Communist Party of China (CPC).

Speaking Friday at the fifth provincial marine conference, Zhang said Guangdong would further exploit marine resources and boost fishery so as to form a balanced economic system together with the economic zone of the Pearl River Delta.

According to Huang Huahua, provincial governor, the 2002 gross output value of the marine industries in his province amounted to 195 billion yuan (US$23.6), which made up one quarter of China's gross marine output value, the top in the country.

Though increasing only by half over 1999, Governor Huang said he believed his province's marine economy still had great potential. "The 420,000-sq-km sea restored a great many unexploited resources, and we had to make full use of that," he said.

Governor Huang Huahua said his province would set aside a special fund of 670 million yuan (US$80 million) to improve living and working conditions of the fishing population in the next five years. Guangdong would also invest in the construction of shipbuilding bases and the exploitation and mining of offshore oil in the South China Sea, he added.

"We hope that in the year 2010, the output value of marine industries in Guangdong will double that at present and the growth will climb from 7.8 percent to 15 percent in the GDP," said Huang.
 
(Xinhua News Agency December 13, 2003)