7. We will intensify efforts to improve people's lives and strive to resolve sensitive and thorny issues affecting their interests.
1) We will carry out a more vigorous employment policy. We will make full use of the important role of the service sector, labor-intensive industries, small and medium-sized enterprises and the non-public sector of the economy in creating jobs. We will integrate efforts to promote development and boost domestic demand with those to increase employment by all possible means. When allocating investment or deciding on major construction projects, we will emphasize their role in stimulating employment. We will encourage more people to start their own businesses or find jobs for themselves, and promote job creation through the creation of new businesses. We will introduce flexible employment mechanisms to relieve the employment pressure created by college graduates entering the workforce, encourage institutions of higher education to hire their graduates to participate in research projects, and encourage college graduates to take jobs in community-level public administration or public service organizations in urban and rural areas, to enlist in the army, and to work in private or small and medium-sized enterprises. We will create more public service positions, with the emphasis on assisting people who have difficulty finding employment, people from zero-employment families and workers in disaster areas. We will effectively handle the problem of reemployment for workers laid off due to efforts to conserve energy, reduce pollution and eliminate backward production facilities. We will strengthen the development of the human resources service system, the vocational training system and the service system for business start-ups, and continue to carry out pilot projects to develop the service infrastructure for rural workers seeking nonagricultural jobs. Rural migrant workers will be given vigorous support to start their own businesses in their hometowns. We will pay attention to the impact of macroeconomic changes on employment and improve dynamic monitoring of major developments in unemployment.
2) We will accelerate improvement of the social safety net for urban and rural residents. We will expand the coverage of urban basic old-age insurance and basic medical insurance, as well as unemployment insurance, workers' compensation and maternity insurance. We will make progress in overall planning concerning old-age pensions at the provincial level, speedily expand trials to fully fund personal accounts for basic old-age insurance, and draw up unified nationwide rules for transferring old-age pension accounts from one region to another and procedures for covering rural migrant workers by basic old-age insurance. We will consolidate and improve the new type of rural cooperative medical care system. We will improve development of public service facilities for social security. We will raise the level of the cost of living allowances for urban and rural residents, increase the subsidies and living allowances for members of entitled groups and other eligible people, and work to establish a dynamic mechanism to adjust the cost of living allowances for urban and rural residents when prices change. The number of urban residents participating in the basic old-age insurance program is expected to grow by 4.2% in 2009.
3) We will accelerate implementation of the project to supply housing for low- and moderate-income families in urban and rural areas. We will undertake construction of low-rent housing on a large scale and make sure such construction projects get the funds and land they need. This year, the central government will allocate 43 billion yuan to support development of government low-rent housing for cost of living allowances recipients with housing difficulties. We will vigorously develop public rental housing. We will speed up the project to improve conditions in urban shantytowns and shantytowns in state-owned forest regions, land reclamation zones and coalmining areas, and complete the work of relocating families and repairing houses in coalmining areas plagued by sinkholes. We will improve the living conditions of rural residents by extending the pilot projects to renovate dangerous rural houses in the central and western regions and accelerating the project to build settlements for nomadic herdsmen.
4) We will strengthen regulation of income distribution. We will establish a sound mechanism to regularly increase the pay of enterprise employees and ensure that they are paid in full and on time, carry out reform of the income distribution system in state-owned enterprises, strengthen control of income distribution in monopoly industries, and accelerate development of a system for monitoring income distribution.
5) We will rectify and standardize the market order. We will exercise rigorous oversight and control on prices and charges directly affecting people's lives and crack down severely on all kinds of production and business activities that violate laws and regulations. We will launch extensive campaigns to ensure food safety, and improve and strictly enforce the standards for product quality and safety. We will establish a system of legal accountability and punishment in which powers, responsibilities and interests are in close correspondence.
6) We will do all we can to maintain social stability. We will intensify our work concerning social management and production safety. We will stress social management during the course of urban and rural integration. We will improve the contingency plans and the policies and measures for responding to great natural disasters and public emergencies, and strengthen services for and supervision of the floating population. We will implement the accountability system for workplace safety and resolutely prevent serious and major accidents. We will raise the overall level of law and order in society.
7) We will continue to intensify our work to relieve poverty through development, relocate more people from inhospitable areas as a poverty relief measure and give more people work in place of relief subsidies. A new poverty line will be adopted and all low-income rural residents will be covered by the poverty relief policy.