As the 17th National Congress of the Communist Party of China (CPC) opens on Monday, foreign and domestic media have been sparing no effort to cover the country's most important political event in five years.

Major global news agencies, such as Associated Press, Reuters and Agence France-Presse (AFP), have run hundreds of stories about the event over the past few months.

Referring to the congress as "a crucial meeting that will define the nation's political agenda for the next five years", AFP interpreted the "scientific outlook on development", which is expected to be incorporated into the Party Constitution, as an attempt to correct many of the imbalances that have accompanied China's economic development over the past 29 years.

The agency quoted Sidney Rittenberg, an American scholar who has had ties with China since the 1940s, as saying that "the most important, and popular, measures that may come out of the Congress for ordinary citizens will be further steps to close the shocking and still-growing income gap between town and country, coast and hinterland."

Most foreign media also show great interest in the agenda of the congress -- to elect the Party's 17th Central Committee that will decide the CPC's new leadership lineup for the coming few years, and to elect a new Central Commission for Discipline Inspection.

The Hong Kong-based Metropolis Daily commented that few party draws such extensive media attention across the world with its national congress as the CPC does, saying it shows the increasingly prominent position of China as well as the 73-million-member ruling party.

All China's major newspapers have been stuffing their frontpages with reports about the CPC congress and some issued feature pages devoted to the once-every-five-years event.

The People's Daily said in its Monday's frontpage editorial that the congress signaled a new page of the CPC history, a new voyage of socialism with Chinese characteristics and a new prospect of the revival of the Chinese nation.

In its Monday issue, the English newspaper China Daily quoted Professor Zhou Tianyong from the Party School of the CPC Central Committee as saying that "building a harmonious society" actually marks a watershed in the leadership as it now has to balance different interest groups amid changing social strata after nearly three decades of market-economy operations.

It was also brought out as a response to the existence of "acutely inharmonious factors" and social woes in recent years, marked by a widening wealth gap, corruption, pollution and inadequate government spending on education and health care, according to Zhou.

(Xinhua News Agency October 15, 2007)