It is the concrete manifestation of the important thought of "three represents" which was made the guide to action for the whole Party at the 16th National Party Congress in November last year, he stressed.

It conforms to the strategic thinking of Deng Xiaoping for realizing modernization in stages and also falls in with the actual national conditions and the will of the people, he said.

Jiang made the remarks at a full-member meeting of the Jiangsu provincial delegation of deputies to the National People's Congress (NPC), China's top legislature.

"This is of great significance in rallying the popular support, inspiring the people to work, accelerating the pace of modernization and realizing the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation," he said.

"The central task in building a well-off society," he said, " is to release and develop productive forces," adding that "it is, therefore, necessary to optimize the economic structure and put emphasis on improving economic performances so as to strive to quadruple GDP in the first 20 years of this century."

Jiang stressed the necessity of blazing a new trail for industrialization by relying on the development of science and technology and of making institutional innovation so as to bring the socialist market economy to perfection.

To realize a well-off society, he noted, it is necessary to realize a harmonious development of both urban and rural areas and among different regions.

He urged efforts to place agriculture and rural development in the first place as the foundation of the national economy, promote urbanization and amass more resources for the development of the middle and western parts of the country to reduce regional disparities.

He reiterated the necessity of a sustainable development in both economic and population development and in both resources and environment so as to steer the whole society onto the path of development featuring developed production, wealthy life and well-protected ecology.

Jiang encouraged the people in Jiangsu, an economically developed coastal province in east China, to go faster and give vent to the burst of vitality of the latent labor, knowledge, technology, management and capital in the province.

(Xinhua News Agency March 12, 2003)