January is the month that the provinces, municipalities and autonomous regions of China hold annual sessions of their local people's congresses, the local legislative bodies, and local comittees of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), the political advisory bodies, prior to the national equivalent of these two sessions in March.

At the provincial Two Sessions, the deputies to the people's congresses and the members of the CPPCC committees listened to work reports delivered by local governments and made plans for the coming 12 months. Local governors and deputies to the 13th National People's Congress were also elected.

Northwest China's Qinghai Province took the lead this year, starting the session of the provincial committee of the CPPCC on January 21 and the session of the people's congress on January 22. The other provincial-level regions across China soon kicked off their own Two Sessions, and by January 26 all the provinces, municipalities and autonomous regions in the country had begun theirs.

The work reports delivered by the local governors sum up achievements and challenges faced over the past year while setting goals for the next.

Improving people's livelihood was a key feature of work reports nationwide as the central focus of regional government efforts for 2018.

Shanghai Mayor Ying Yong revealed in his report that the city plans to enhance efforts to foster the residential leasing market in 2018 by accelerating real estate development and offering support for home leasing companies and institutions.

Ying unveiled plans to build or convert 200,000 housing units into rentals in 2018, while adding a further 90,000 housing units managed by house rental agencies.

The mayor pledged to stick to the current tightening of housing market policies and vowed to expedite the establishment of a housing system that will ensure supply from multiple sources.

Acting Mayor of Beijing Chen Jining revealed in his government work report on January 24 that the city supplied 721 hectares of land for the construction of residential housing in 2017, having announced plans in April last year to supply a total of 6,000 hectares by 2021 in a bid to meet the demand for residential housing.

According to Chen, Beijing will allocate a further 1,200 hectares of land for the construction of residential housing this year, with the likelihood of additional contributions to develop the city's rental market. Beijing will develop a rental market focused on long-term leases and further promote the construction of rental housing on collectively owned rural land, he said.

The city has also introduced a spate of measures to cool the housing market, including higher down payments, higher mortgage rates, tougher purchase restrictions and joint property rights.

Beijing also unveiled series of new regulations relating to people's daily lives. Li Wei, Beijing's top legislator, said that the new rules are aimed at tackling Beijing's "big city diseases" such as heavy traffic, bad pollution and high housing prices.

"This year we will review the work reports of the governmental departments whose work is most closely related to residents' everyday lives such as education and health, hoping to provide better services for the people by increasing supervision," Li said.

Over the past five years, the legislature of Beijing has brought in 18 new regulations and revised eight existing rules, as work focus transfers from the city's economic development to the quality of people's lives.

In southwest China's Guizhou Province, 1.2 million people were lifted out of poverty, 763,000 people relocated from uninhabitable homes, 200,000 dilapidated houses renovated, and 830,000 subsidies provided for poor students in 2017, according to the government work report delivered by Acting Governor Chen Yiqin on January 25.

The proportion of people living below the poverty line has dropped sharply from 26.8 percent to less than 8 percent in Guizhou over the past five years, with governments at various levels striving to help more people out of poverty in 2018, sparing no efforts to achieve China's national target of completely eradicating poverty by 2020.

Statistics released at the people's congress of southwest China's Tibet Autonomous Region showed a 23.9-percent increase in fixed assets investments in the region, totaling around 205 billion yuan ($32.59 billion). The per-capita disposable income of urban and rural residents in the region also increased by 10.3 percent and 13.6 percent respectively.

Over the past five years, Tibet has been one of the fastest growing provincial regions in China, with livelihoods, the environment, infrastructure and competitive industries all having improved.

To aid the development of Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region in the northwest, 19 provinces or municipalities paired with the autonomous region committed a total of 15.18 billion yuan ($2.41 billion) toward poverty alleviation efforts and increasing the rate of employment in the region.

"Textile, electronic and agricultural processing enterprises were introduced to the region last year, which have helped promote employment among local people, maintained stability in the region and increased communication between local residents and inland cities," said Shohrat Zakir, Chairman of the Xinjiang Regional Government, in his report.

Since the 18th National Congress of the Communist Party of China in 2012, these 19 partner provinces or municipalities have invested 72.4 billion yuan ($11.51 billion) in Xinjiang, providing more than 500,000 job opportunities to local residents, according to official statistics.

Governor of north China's Hebei Province Xu Qin introduced in his work report that the three major objectives for Hebei in 2018 are promoting coordinated development with Beijing and Tianjin, constructing the Xiongan New Area and preparing for the Beijing Winter Olympic Games in 2022.

China unveiled plans for the Xiongan New Area on April 1, 2017, a 2,000-square-km economic zone spanning Xiongxian, Rongcheng and Anxin counties in Hebei designed to integrate Beijing with its surrounding areas.

Xu said that Hebei plans to roll out a series of key projects in 2018 including high-speed railways, expressways, reforestation and environmental protection of the Baiyangdian Lake.

These plans were echoed in the work reports of both Beijing and Tianjin.

Central China's Henan Province proposed increasing pensions for retirees in urban areas, while Heilongjiang Province in the northeast also pledged to increase the basic pension for its urban population from 80 yuan ($12.7) to 108 yuan ($17.2). East China's Anhui Province plans to increase the minimum standard of the basic pension by 50 percent.

Medical care, general practitioners and compulsory education all featured elsewhere in the plans for 2018.

Shifting gear

High-quality development was another key word at the local Two Sessions, with many locales expecting a slowdown in the rise of GDP, a sign echoing the transformation of China's economy from high-speed to high-quality growth. Anhui lowered its target GDP growth rate for 2018 from last year's 8.5 percent to just over 8 percent; Hubei Province, from 8 percent to 7.5 percent and Gansu Province, from 7.5 percent to 6 percent.

Economic performance indicators such as GDP have been the historical measure of government performance, but these have given way to other criteria such as the green development index, released by the National Bureau of Statistics in 2017 and covering 55 categories such as energy consumption efficiency, carbon emissions and air quality.

In 2017, southeast China's Fujian Province, ranked second on China's first ever green development index rankings, maintaining its reputation as one of the country's greenest province while remaining on course for rapid economic growth.

In 2017, Fujian also embraced the clean river initiative, which sees officials at each level of government assume responsibility for the water sources in their area, while the green development index was incorporated into government appraisal systems at every administrative level of the province.

Tang Dengjie, Acting Governor of the province, revealed at the opening of the session of the provincial people's congress that Fujian's air quality was in line with national standards on 351 days in 2017. In the province's 12 major rivers, 95.8 percent of the water reached Grade III or higher, meaning it was potable. The province's forest coverage rate also increased to 95.95 percent, a national high.

Traditional manufacturing center Chongqing set shifting from fast to quality growth as its main goal for the next five years, according to Tang Liangzhi, the city's acting mayor.

Tang said that Chongqing will promote the integration of the real economy with the Internet, big data and artificial intelligence to develop smart industries. The city will also upgrade traditional manufacturing, expand the application of big data and cloud computing to more areas, and nurture an emerging industry cluster consisting of new-energy vehicles, high-end equipment, new materials and medicine.

Jiangsu Province, the country's largest manufacturing area and second largest contributor to national GDP, reported annual GDP growth of 7.2 percent in 2017. Three cities in the province, Suzhou, Nanjing, and Wuxi, reported GDP above 1 trillion yuan ($159 billion).

After years of industrial upgrading and structural reform, hi-tech companies like Huawei and Alibaba are making considerable investment in Wuxi, and the city has become home to projects related to integrated circuits and the Internet of Things.

"From a traditional manufacturing city that relies on labor and resources to a smart city focusing on intelligent manufacturing, Wuxi's progress demonstrates the transformation of the manufacturing sector in Jiangsu, and even in China," said Huang Qin, Executive Vice Mayor of Wuxi.

In a freshening up of the provincial Two Sessions, more young faces were visible in the local two sessions this year. Shi Pengfei, born in 1992, is a deputy to the Henan Provincial People's Congress. Graduating from the University of Liverpool in 2014, he returned to Dulouma Village in Weishi County to become a farmer. Two years of hard work without weekends or holidays has transformed him from a bookworm into a capable farm hand, and has taught him many lessons about developing green agriculture in his hometown.

"Discovering a green, healthy and profitable means of agricultural development is an urgent issue for our country as we have vast agricultural lands and a large population," Shi told Henan Daily. "This is what I am working toward now and I hope to find a way that can benefit more people in rural areas."

Copyedited by Laurence Coulton

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