Hua Lianguo, 62, a retired engineer, withdrew his usual pension Wednesday from a bank near his residential community rather than the office in his former enterprise, a large state-owned metallurgy firm in northeast China's Jilin Province.

Moreover, the community where he and his colleagues have lived for decades has recently hired a new logistics company to deal with community management, replacing the office dispatched by the metallurgy company.

As a result of on-going economic structural reforms, quite a few employees feel much more profound, in-depth changes than they did years before, said Prof. Tian Yipeng of sociology with prestigious Jilin University, adding that many people had to learn to live without umbrella of the enterprise-sponsored welfare.

During the past decades, the state-owned firms functioned like all-inclusive tiny societies and many of them ran a large number of facilities including cafeterias, libraries, nurseries and kindergartens, schools, barbershops and even hospitals and hotels, bringing some kind of the comprehensive, cradle-to-tomb welfare benefits to the employees.

The welfare system together with other problems such as monoeconomic structure seriously negatively affected the enterprise's operation and development especially in northeast China, which was a leading industrial center around China in the 1950s and 1960s, and became sluggish in marching toward the market economy in the mid-1990s.

In an effort to find a way out, huge enterprises started to discard unessential welfare burdens. In Jilin province, an independent logistics company was established last December to deal with the living communities of employees of three gigantic state-owned enterprises.

The enterprises had too many distractions in the old system, said Zhang Xiaopei, general manager of the state-owned Jilin Chemical Industrial Group Company, adding that it was high time to withdraw from all the unnecessary fields and focus on their major businesses.

The central government also kicked off a welfare reform in northeastern Liaoning Province in the year 2001 and so far a total of 6.547 million people participated in the social welfare system, accounting for 76.1 percent of all the employed. The reform would, too, start in Jilin and Heilongjiang provinces next year.

The reform is conducive in the process of revitalizing the economy and at the same time it is likely to bring more great impact to society, and the government is held responsible to further improving the social welfare system, said Prof. Tian Yipeng.

Including the welfare reform, a range of prompt measures has been applied to spur the state-owned enterprises. In September, the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee called for accelerated efforts to revitalize the old northeast industrial base, describing it as a long-term and arduous task.

Covering the provinces of Heilongjiang, Jilin and Liaoning, the northeast China region played a vital role in the country's industrial development in 1950s to early 1970s.

The ratio of the region's industrial output value to the national total dropped to nine percent from a record 17 percent.

The Chinese government decided in early September to turn those outdated, rusty and lagging industrial centers in the northeast and other parts of China into modern industrial bases, making them new and essential growth areas of the national economy.

(Xinhua News Agency October 9, 2003)