ENSURING FOOD SAFETY: Yu Weiguo (second right), Secretary of the Xiamen Municipal Committee of the Communist Party of China, inspects the kitchen of a food company on October 10, 2012 (ZHENG XIAODONG)

Dubbed a "garden city by the sea," Xiamen is famous for its beautiful sceneries and clean and livable environment. Yu Weiguo, Secretary of the Xiamen Municipal Committee of the Communist Party of China, talked about the city's latest efforts to improve the livelihood of its residents in an interview with Beijing Review. Edited excerpts follow.

Beijing Review: How has Xiamen achieved nationwide fame?

Yu Weiguo: The city has a very good geographic location and comfortable climate. Located by the sea and against mountains, the city is renowned for its clean air, blue sky, beautiful gardens, parks and sunny beaches.

In addition to breathtaking natural beauty, the city also has a rich preservation of Chinese cultural heritage, such as the Minnan culture, music and piano heritage from the Gulangyu Island, which we are applying for to become a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and the Jiageng architecture style.

In recent years, Xiamen has consistently ranked at the top of China's favorite tourist cities. Tourists from home and abroad speak highly of the city.

This on the one hand makes us quite proud, and on the other adds immense pressure. We need to work relentlessly to maintain Xiamen's beauty and improve upon that quality in the future.

The biggest feature of Xiamen's development is that it's coordinated, which is reflected in the speed and quality of economic growth, social development, and ecological protection.

Xiamen's efforts in coordinated development have garnered nationwide recognition. The city has been bestowed the title of National Model City for nine consecutive years.

What aspects do Xiamen focus on when it comes to improving people's livelihood?

During the past decade, Xiamen has adopted higher and stricter standards to improve people's livelihood alongside the city's economic development.

We're intensifying efforts to improve well-being with a focus on six aspects: employment, education, healthcare, food safety, housing, and the traffic situation.

Employment has always been the foundation for a stable society. Unemployment in Xiamen is special. During industrialization, many fishermen lost their jobs and didn't have the necessary skills to reintegrate into the workforce. In light of this, we formulated two policies. First, we offered job skill training classes for the unemployed according to market demands. Second, we offered 3,042 yuan ($488.24) in subsidies to a company for each local worker that it hired, which encouraged Xiamen-based firms to hire local staff.

The employment rate of university graduates in Xiamen is as high as 93 percent, much higher than the national average level of 80 percent. We adopted many measures to achieve this, including organizing career fairs, offering internship opportunities for university graduates unable to find work, arranging job skill training, offering career consulting services and providing social security subsidies to those who are unemployed for a year or more.

Xiamen also ensures that education is accessible in an equitable way.

As a special economic zone, Xiamen is, in a sense, a migrant city. Right now, the city has a population of 3.61 million, among whom 1.76 million don't have a Xiamen hukou (permanent residence status). Each year, around 15,000 migrant workers move to Xiamen with their children. Providing education for these children is a focus of our job.