In the five decades following the founding of the People's Republic of China, great advances have been made as a result of the tremendous efforts to develop the rural economy, and to improve people's lives. Two decades of reform and opening up, in particular, have helped to turn a new page in China's rural development by establishing our fundamental economic system with public ownership as the mainstay with the coexistence of diversified ownership. Our rural operating system is based upon family contract and combines central planning with autonomy. Cur income distribution system is based on labor and physical inputs and our farm product marketing system is ruled by the market mechanism.

In the past five decades, China's agriculture and rural economy have witnessed rapid development in the following areas:

· Great production increases in farm products have supply-demand balances and even surpluses in good crop years. Since 1978, China's grain production has been increasing at an annual rate of 2.6 per cent, twice the population growth rate in the same period. Per capita grain availability exceeds 400kg and our grain reserve has hit an historical high. The production of cotton, oilseeds, meat and fishery products has also multiplied several times.

· The extraordinary growth of township and village enterprises. In 1997, township and village enterprises in China produced an output value of 1800 billion yuan (RMB), 40 times more than the 1978 figure and 30 per cent of GDP. Rural secondary and tertiary industries took up 75.6 per cent of the whole rural economy up by 44 percentage points compared with 1978. Employing 130 million rural surplus laborers, township and village enterprises have helped to speed up China's rural industrialization process and led to the mushrooming of a large group of new towns in rural areas.

· The farmers' living standard has been improving. Farmers' per capita net income grew from l34yuan inl978 to 2090yuan in 1997, representing a growth of 3.4 times and

An annual growth rate of 8.1 per cent in real term. the rural poverty-stricken population shrank from 250 million in 1978 to 50 million at the end of 1997. At the same time, social welfare activities in the rural areas have been developed, democratic and legal systems strengthened and farmers' technical and educational levels, and legal awareness, improved.

To achieve our cross-century blueprint for the year 2010, China will stick to the following policies:

· To make agriculture the top priority in our national economic development, to increase input into agriculture, enhance agricultural legislation and law enforcement and to support and protect agriculture.

· To stabilize rural basic policies in the long run, focusing on the stabilization of the rural economic system, the operational system and distribution system.

· To deepen rural reform, including the improvement of the rural ownership structure, socialized agricultural service system, farm product circulation system and agricultural commercialisation.

· To readjust and optimise agricultural structure and promote the development of high-yield, high-quality and high-efficiency agriculture while always emphasising grain production.

· To implement the strategy of invigorating agriculture with research and education, push forward the agricultural technical revolution and to promote the transformation of agricultural growth.

· To strengthen the agricultural infrastructure development process and improve agricultural production conditions.

· To develop township and village enterprises, optimise the rural industrial structure and speed up the development of small rural towns.

· To enhance our efforts at poverty alleviation and to achieve common prosperity.

· To uphold the principle of equality and conduct international co-operation and exchange in agricultural sciences and technology.

· To boost the development of rural grass-roots democratic and legislative systems to bring about the coordinated rural socioeconomic development.

China will make further progress in the new century in its rural reform and development through our people's hard work and under the guidance of the Deng Xiaoping Theory and the strong leadership of our Central Party Committee under President Jiang Zemin.