9. Ensuring people’s wellbeing and satisfying their basic needs. We will effectively solve those problems affecting people’s wellbeing that were caused by the epidemic through increasing input and ensuring the implementation of relevant policies.

1) We will use all possible means to keep employment stable. We will enhance assistance and support for small and medium-sized businesses affected by the epidemic, support enterprises in keeping employment stable, and regulate layoffs. We will increase the provision of public employment services so that they cover both urban and rural permanent residents, ensure that channels are open for people to register as unemployed, and support the development of service platforms for employee sharing and employment support in order to fully exert the role of for-profit human resource agencies and other market-based service providers. We will accelerate the execution of various existing plans for enlarging college enrollment and military recruitment, while SOEs will keep expanding recruitment of college graduates both during this year and the next. We will encourage college graduates to find employment at the community level. We will provide more internship opportunities and encourage more college graduates to provide community-level services by serving as teachers, agro-technicians, medical staff, and poverty relief workers in townships. We will leverage the role of business startups in boosting employment, launch the initiative to develop leaders for innovation and business startups in rural areas, support migrant workers, college graduates, and demobilized military personnel in returning home or moving to the countryside to start businesses, facilitate flexible employment through multiple channels, and appropriately set aside venues for street vendors. Public infrastructure projects will be encouraged to hire more local people so that rural workers can work closer to home. We will support the joint development and sharing of basic platforms for public vocational skills training. We will give greater support to vocational skills training, and mobilize junior and senior high school graduates who are unable to continue their education as well as young people who are registered as unemployed to undertake pre-employment training. Over the course of this year and the next, vocational skills training programs will provide at least 35 million places, thereby completing the goal of providing 50 million training places in three years, while vocational colleges will expand their enrollments by 2 million.

2) We will move quickly to address inadequacies in public health services. We will improve the public health services system and strengthen legal guarantees in this area, while appropriately increasing government subsidies for basic public health services. We will build up the ranks of public health workers, and enhance disease prevention and control capabilities at the community level. We will reform the disease prevention and control mechanism. We will improve the prevention and control system and mechanisms for major epidemics, and refine the national system for public health emergency responses. We will comprehensively build up centers for disease control and prevention, and ensure that bio-safety level-3 laboratories are available in all provinces. We will put in place a mobilization mechanism whereby specialized infectious disease hospitals as well as the infectious and respiratory departments of comprehensive hospitals play the main role and other medical institutions act as the reserve, and make plans for national major epidemic treatment bases. We will deepen the comprehensive reform of public hospitals, develop Internet Plus Healthcare models, and improve the capacity of medical services in urban and rural communities. We will press ahead with tiered medical diagnosis and treatment, and work to ensure that interactions between doctor and patient are amicable. We will facilitate the revitalization of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM), and refine the TCM medical services system. We will continue to press ahead with preventive health care for the general public, and carry forward the Healthy China initiative.

3) We will step up improvement of our social security system. We will steadily turn over the overall management of basic medical insurance accounts to higher-level authorities, ensure the effective management of basic medical insurance accounts at the prefecture-level, and encourage explorations of provincial-level unified management where conditions allow. We will put in place a dynamic mechanism for adjusting the catalog of medicines covered by medical insurance. We will make more efficient use of medical insurance funds, improve budgetary management in this regard, adopt diverse methods for making medical insurance payouts for different medical services, strengthen performance evaluations of designated medical institutions, and realize trans-provincial settlement of medical bills via basic medical insurance accounts. We will increase annual government subsidy with regard to basic medical insurance for rural and non-working urban residents by 30 yuan per person. We will improve the mechanism for guaranteeing the supply of in-demand medicines, and further coordinate medical service, medical insurance, and pharmaceutical reforms. We will gradually bring more types of medicines under the scheme for centralized state medicine procurement and use, and conduct trials on state centralized procurement of high-value medical consumables. We will encourage provincial-level unified management of unemployment insurance funds, and fully ensure provincial-level unified management of workers’ compensation funds. We will move faster to bring old-age insurance funds under national unified management, while realizing the unified collection and spending of enterprise employees’ basic old-age insurance funds at the provincial level. The basic old-age benefits for rural and non-working urban residents will be appropriately increased. We will effectively implement the time-limited policies for reducing, exempting, and postponing payment of social insurance premiums, and ensure that relevant benefits are paid on time and in full. We will move quickly to appropriate a portion of state capital to replenish social security funds. We will speed up the establishment of a multi-tiered social security system, devote substantial efforts to developing enterprise annuities, occupational annuities, and supplemental medical insurance programs, and promote the establishment and development of the “third pillar” of old-age insurance. We will expand the coverage of unemployment insurance, making sure local insurance schemes cover all unemployed people such as rural migrant workers that have been insured for less than one year. We will expand the coverage of subsistence allowances to all urban and rural households in need, and provide, in a timely manner, subsistence allowances and other forms of assistance for eligible unemployed urban residents and returning rural migrant workers. We will guarantee benefits for the families of those who have died in service of the public. We will safeguard the legitimate rights and interests of women, children, elderly people, and the disabled, and improve the system for supporting and caring for children, women, and elderly people left behind in rural areas. We will improve the housing support system, strive to foster and develop the housing rental market, and do more to help disadvantaged urban residents solve their housing problems.

4) We will realize a stable increase in personal incomes and guarantee basic living standards for key groups. We will further stabilize people’s expectations about increases in property incomes, and appropriately increase the amount of bonds issued by both central and local governments to individuals. We will encourage areas to further raise the transfer incomes of their residents where conditions allow. We will coordinate reforms of the income distribution system in key sectors, and improve the systems of wage guidelines and salary surveys for enterprises. We will ensure that migrant workers enjoy the same policies for employment and business startups as the registered residents of the cities in which they work, and that they are paid for their work in accordance with law, and stop any new issues regarding wage arrears for rural migrant workers at the source, so that they are better able to integrate into the cities they have moved to. We will tighten oversight over the price of major agricultural products at important junctures. We will continue the practice of increasing social security assistance and benefit payments in step with price rises, and ensure that the basic needs of people facing difficulties are met. We will coordinate efforts to build a sound social assistance system covering both urban and rural populations, steadily increase urban and rural subsistence allowances, and continue to link policies regarding subsistence allowances and other forms of assistance with poverty alleviation policies.

5) We will continue to improve public services. We will promote the formulation of national standards for basic public services, and push forward the standardization of community-level service providers. We will stabilize spending on education, optimize the mix of spending, and reduce the disparities between urban and rural areas, between regions, and between schools. We will reinforce the funding mechanism for compulsory education in urban and rural areas, actively address the problem of oversized classes in urban compulsory education schools, step up the development of boarding schools located in towns and townships, small rural schools, and county schools, and refine the policy of ensuring access to compulsory education for children who live with their migrant worker parents. We will provide quality special needs education and continuing education. We will increase the provision of public-interest preschool education through multiple channels, support efforts to make high-quality, public-interest preschool educational resources more broadly available in deeply impoverished areas, and help private kindergartens overcome difficulties. We will move quickly to universalize senior secondary education and continue to improve the conditions of schools in impoverished areas. We will steadily develop regular undergraduate and graduate education, support the development of colleges in the western region, and increase college enrollment of students from rural and poor areas. Regular institutions of higher learning are projected to enroll 9.20 million undergraduate students and 1.114 million graduate students. We will push forward trials of greater integration between industry and vocational education, strengthen the workforce of teachers and promote IT application in education. We will respond proactively to population aging, and support private entities in running more public-interest elderly care and childcare services. We will ensure that philosophy and the social sciences flourish. We will ensure that China’s cultural and historical artifacts are given effective protection and are used to greater benefit, and that our intangible cultural heritage is carried forward. We will continue with the implementation of projects for the promotion of culture and tourism, promote the protection and development of the Yellow River culture, accelerate the construction of major cultural facilities, and push forward the development of all-for-one tourism, rural tourism, and tourism related to the early history of the CPC. We will continue to develop Hainan into an international tourism and shopping destination, to develop Hengqin as an international leisure and tourism resort, and to develop Pingtan into an international tourism island. We will also boost the development of the Internet Plus Tourism model. We will introduce a “pacesetter” initiative to improve the quality and expand the size of the domestic services sector across the board, and move forward with the construction of venues for the 2022 Winter Olympics. We will strengthen the standardization of emergency management, and accelerate reform of the management systems and mechanisms for ensuring the security of reserves of strategic goods and emergency supplies. We will improve monitoring and early warning of natural disasters, and step up implementation of major projects for natural disaster prevention and control, so as to ensure effective disaster prevention, mitigation, and relief. We will improve and develop new approaches to social governance, improve the mechanism for community management and services, and enhance community-level emergency response capacity. We will also step up development of the public legal service system. We will tighten and improve oversight over food and drug safety. We will strictly enforce the accountability system for workplace safety, ensure workplace safety, search for potential dangers, and resolutely prevent the occurrence of major accidents of all types.

We will fully and faithfully implement the policy of One Country, Two Systems, under which the people of Hong Kong govern Hong Kong and the people of Macao govern Macao, with a high degree of autonomy for both regions. We will firmly support and encourage Hong Kong and Macao in integrating into the overall development of the country. To fully leverage Hong Kong’s standing as an international financial, shipping, and trade center, we will implement the agreements made under the Closer Economic Partnership Arrangement (CEPA) between the mainland and Hong Kong. We will support Macao’s endeavor to become a world tourism and leisure center and to serve as a platform for facilitating business and trade cooperation between China and Portuguese-speaking countries. We will continue expanding cross-Strait economic and cultural exchanges and cooperation, create more development opportunities for our fellow countrymen and women from Taiwan and for their businesses, and treat them the same as local residents.

This year, we have an additional important task to perform: In accordance with the decisions and plans of the CPC Central Committee and the State Council, and on the basis of conducting an overall evaluation of the implementation of the 13th Five-Year Plan, we will widely solicit opinions and draw on the wisdom of the people, and thereby formulate the 14th Five-Year Plan for Economic and Social Development (2021-2025). We will coordinate the drafting of national subject-specific plans, regional plans, spatial plans, and local plans during the 14th Five-Year Plan period, and prepare to submit the draft 14th Five-Year Plan to the fourth session of the 13th NPC for its deliberation.

Esteemed Deputies,

Coordinating epidemic containment and economic and social development in 2020 is both a demanding and an important task. We will rally ever closer around the CPC Central Committee with Comrade Xi Jinping at its core, hold high the great banner of socialism with Chinese characteristics, and follow the guidance of Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era. We must keep firmly in mind the need to maintain political integrity, think in big-picture terms, follow the leadership core, and keep in alignment; strengthen our confidence in the path, theory, system, and culture of socialism with Chinese characteristics; and resolutely uphold General Secretary Xi Jinping’s core position on the Party Central Committee and in the Party as a whole, and resolutely uphold the Party Central Committee’s authority and its centralized, unified leadership. We will act on the decisions and plans of the CPC Central Committee and the State Council, readily accept the oversight of the NPC, and welcome comments and suggestions from the CPPCC National Committee. Let us rise to each challenge, take pragmatic measures, shoulder our responsibilities, and tackle major difficulties in driving the economy forward, boosting production, and expanding demand, while at the same time continuing with our regular epidemic prevention and control efforts. Let us strive to realize our economic and social development goals for the year, complete the building of a moderately prosperous society in all respects, and provide a solid foundation as we embark on a new journey to comprehensively build a modern socialist China.