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| Sunday, 6 March 2005 |
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China's Wen seeks peace with Taiwan, stable economy BEIJING, Saturday, China's premier stressed the goal of peaceful reunification with Taiwan in his annual address to parliament on Saturday and pledged to keep the world's seventh-largest economy growing without overheating. But Wen Jiabao gave few details of a new law that could provide the legal basis for an attack on the island, which Beijing considers part of Chinese territory. Wen was addressing 3,000 delegates to the National People's Congress in the cavernous Great Hall of the People, a Soviet-era behemoth and throwback to the China of Mao Zedong. They interrupted his two-hour speech with 26 rounds of applause, the loudest when he appealed for national unity. In separate reports to parliament later on Saturday, development chief Ma Kai was to pledge to keep economic cooling measures firmly in place, saying he expected fixed-asset investment growth to slow sharply this year. And Finance Minister Jin Renqing will project a lower budget deficit as Beijing scales back stimulus spending that has been in place for seven years. Security was tight around the Great Hall with police vans parked on the vast Tiananmen Square to the east. Delegates passed through metal detectors before clustering inside the main foyer, sipping tea, chatting and snapping pictures of each other. China has claimed sovereignty over Taiwan since the end of the country's civil war in 1949, when the defeated Nationalists fled there. It has threatened to attack the self-governing island of 23 million people if it formally declares independence. "TERRITORIAL INTEGRITY" Wen said the draft anti-secession law showed that "we are working most sincerely and energetically to bring about peaceful reunification". But he stressed the "strong determination of the entire Chinese people to safeguard the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the country and never allow secessionist forces working for 'Taiwan independence' to separate Taiwan from China under any name or by any means." |
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