China's population and family planning minister on Friday said China will work to limit its mainland population below 1.37 billion by 2010.

Zhang Weiqing, minister in charge of the National Population and Family Planning Commission (NPFPC), said that China has been working to build a new mechanism featuring management according to law, self-governance of villagers or residents, quality services, policy impetus and comprehensive management as an overall approach towards the population issue during the past few years.

On a workshop held in Qingdao of the eastern China's Shandong province, Zhang stressed that China will keep its family planning policy in place to maintain a low birth level.

To some extent, China's population growth has been brought under control in the past 30 years, with a steady growth of 100 million people every seven years, postponing China's 1.3-billion Population Day by four years to fall on early this year. According to data released by NPFPC, given China failed to implement the family planning policy, China's population would be nearly 400 million more than the present figure.

Zhang said China should continue to improve its population legal system in an effort to work out laws and regulations on managing unbalanced sex ratio at birth, reducing birth defect rate, strengthening management of population control medicines and family planning services to eliminate practices that hurt people's legal rights and interests.

He also stressed that work should be done to study population policies focusing on all-round development of humans and implement interest-oriented policies to award and assist families practicing family planning.

Starting from 2004, China began to implement a pilot project of "rewarding some rural households practicing family planning." Last year, more than 310,000 farmers in 10 cities of five provinces where the pilot project was implemented received around 200 million yuan (24 million dollars) in cash reward for having only one child or two daughters in their families.

The Sept. 16-18 meeting will study progresses and experience during the Tenth Five-Year Plan period from 2001 to 2005 on family planning reform and new mechanism construction and put forward the goal that most regions in the country should set up such a mechanism by 2010 as a way to properly handle the population issue in a comprehensive way.

(Xinhua News Agency September 17, 2005)