Vice-Premier Wu Bangguo has called for vigorous promotion of China's information infrastructure and the utilization of technological innovations to boost progress of the national economy and society.
Wu, a member of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China Central Committee, was speaking at a nationwide televised working conference on informatization Friday. Wu is also a deputy head of the national leading group on informatization.
Wu said China should attach top priority to informatization, quoting President Jiang Zemin as saying, "None of the Four Modernizations can be realized without informatization."
The "Four Modernizations" refers to the modernization of industry, agriculture, defense, and science and technology.
To promote informatization was of strategic importance to the country's modernization, he said. It was also essential for China to increase international competitiveness, he stressed.
Zeng Peiyan, a deputy head of the national leading group on informatization and Ministry of the State Development Planning Commission, also spoke on the development of the telecommunications and information industries at the meeting.
Zeng proposed that by 2005, the ownership rate of telephones would pass 40 percent, the number of cable television subscribers would top 150 million, and the rate of Internet users exceed eightpercent.
(People's Daily July 27, 2002)
