China Daily:
Just now you mentioned the initial progress made last year in terms of cutting industrial capacity, reducing the housing inventory, lowering leverage, cutting corporate costs and improving weak economic links. Would you please elaborate on how such progress has been made, which sectors may still suffer from slow development and what measures will be unveiled to keep advancing the reform? Thank you.
Xu Shaoshi:
Cutting industrial capacity, reducing the housing inventory, lowering leverage, cutting corporate costs and improving weak economic links are the five major tasks in supply-side structural reform. Last year was an initial period for this undertaking, and seen from the achievements, a general design has been accomplished. Recently, as per the deployment of the State Council, we have been phasing out obsolete industrial capacity in the steel and coal sectors. We have sent our work teams to check and they will report around Jan. 15. Based on their findings, we will make better plans for the new year's work on cutting industrial capacity.
As for reducing housing inventory, you must have noticed it has been dropping for nine months. As for debt-to-equity swap, I mentioned just now that we managed to lower cost by one trillion yuan. Improving weak economic links is also crucial. Last year, we raised more than 10 million people out of poverty, in addition to the cross-regional relocations of 2.49 million households and the upgrade of living quarters for six million households. We also made remarkable progress in improving basic public services and in building public facilities.
In reducing housing inventory, a contradiction we face is the high housing price in bigger cities and high inventory in smaller cities. Both central departments and local governments made great efforts. Recently, housing prices were effectively curbed; we are working on a long-term mechanism to ensure the healthy and stable development of the property sector, including laws, regulations and financial policies. Certainly, when we are reducing housing inventory, we should also consider bringing in 100 million people into cities under the urbanization program. Therefore, we should take an overall approach to shantytown transformation and the reduction of housing inventory in smaller cities.