CRI听力：China Strives to Build a Harmonious Society

Anchor: At the opening session of the 17th CPC national congress, General Secretary Hu Jintao said building a harmonious society was a long-term task for China's socialist process. This particular topic has been widely discussed among those attending the gathering in Beijing.
 
According to a number of delgates, over the past few years, government at all levels in China has achieved excellent progress in tackling problems of most concern to the public. CRI's reporter Li Gang has the story.

Reporter: Zhao Yuzhong is a delegate to the CPC national congress, coming from Chaohu City of east China's Anhui Province. Zhao is a lawyer working at a local legal aid center. In China, legal aid centers provide free legal assistance and advice to disadvantaged groups, so that they can have proper legal protection. Since 1999, he has offered legal aid to people in more than 500 cases.

"When our legal aid center was established in 1999, the government allocated funds were not quite enough. Now we have quite sufficient funds from the government. This shows that our government pays more and more attention to problems of public concern. These problems are mainly about rights and justice. If we can solve the problems, our society will become more and more harmonious."

What Zhao Yuzhong talks about is only one part of China's goal to build up a harmonious society. After the opening-up policy was implemented, China faced some contradictory problems such as the imbalanced pace of development between different regions, the mounting pressure of unemployment and an incomplete social security system. It was in this economic environment that the Communist Party of China proposed the concept of building up a harmonious society in the year 2004.

Zhang Jiehui is a delegate from the city of Anshan in Northeast China's Liaoning Province. He is also Party Secretary of the city. He says unemployment was once a problem for the city and for the whole Northeast Old Industrial bases, but after 2004, the pressure has been greatly relieved.

"Anshan has put great efforts in tackling the problem of unemployment. Now, more than 13 thousand families have at least one person employed whereas previously not one member had a job. By far, unemployment has definitely become a much more minor problem in Anshan's social development. "

According to the statistics issued by the Ministry of Labor and Social Security, China's overall employment scale has expanded rapidly in recent years. Each year, more than 9 million people are newly employed. In the year 2006, the newly employed people in China's cities and urban areas exceeded 10 million for the first time. This indicates a more harmonious social environment for the general public.

Li Gang, CRI news.