Greater efforts by local governments are needed to build a peaceful countryside to create a social environment for building a harmonious socialist society, said Luo Gan, secretary of the Central Committee for Comprehensive Management of Public Security (CCCMPS), at a plenary session of the committee on Monday.

The adoption of "the Resolution on Some Major Issues for Building A Harmonious Socialist Society", prepared by the recent Sixth Plenary Session of the Sixteenth CPC Central Committee, has put forward new and higher criteria for comprehensively managing public security, said Luo, who is also a member of the Standing Committee of the CPC Central Committee Political Bureau.

Luo urged local authorities to crack down on crimes in rural areas, especially mafia-like organized crime, to take efforts to prevent and reduce crimes, and improve the building of rural police departments. Greater efforts should be made to improve grassroots Party organizations and village committees, he said.

China is dispatching more policemen to rural regions and over 30,000 police stations have been built in the countryside as the government streamlines its larger police stations and redeploys more police officers, said Public Security Vice-Minister Liu Jinguo at the session.

Police have been researching the public security situation in villages enabling better safeguarding of social order.

"It's stable overall in terms of public security in rural areas", he said, though he warned China's rapid urbanization poses public security risks in areas bordering urban regions and in relatively developed areas of the countryside.

The number of criminal cases investigated by police nationwide also fell in the first nine months of the year by 1.2 percent to 3.34 million.

(Xinhua News Agency November 7, 2006)