China Chooses Champion of Poor As New Premier

A new generation of Chinese leaders headed by the incoming premier, Wen Jiabao, has been approved in Beijing, amid hopes that more efforts will be made to tackle the gap between rich and poor and other urgent social problems.

Mr Wen, who began his career in one of China's poorest regions, made a point this year of visiting a coal mine to show his concern for underpaid workers.

Unlike most leaders on such visits, he went underground to talk to miners at the coalface and inspected safety equipment.

"We can't build a well-off society unless we work really hard to improve the living standards of farmers and urban dwellers with a humble income," he said after his trip to Shanxi province.

Mining is China's most dangerous profession: official statistics say that more than 5,700 miners died last year. More deaths have been covered up by local authorities seeking to avoid blame.

Mr Wen heads a list of candidates for the senior government posts approved yesterday by the presidium of the national people's congress, the annual parliament.

Although the NPC still has to vote on the list - which remains technically secret until then - everyone knows that Mr Wen has been selected to succeed the outgoing premier, Zhu Rongji.

The NPC will also approve the appointment of Hu Jintao to succeed the supreme leader, Jiang Zemin, as president.

Mr Hu took over from Mr Jiang as party leader at last November's Communist party congress.

The media has highlighted appeals by congress members this year for better policies to tackle poverty and unemploy ment, particularly in the deprived rural areas.

Congress delegates complain that the official rural poverty threshold - beneath which farmers qualify for special aid - is far too low. It stands at an income of 625 yuan (£50) a year.

"Rural migrant workers do not receive equal access to medical services, education for their children and many other services," said one delegate, Li Zhi.

"The government does not have effective policies."

Mr Wen, 60, belongs to the "fourth generation" of leaders who are too young to remember the period of revolution before the 1949 communist victory. Most were educated to be engineers or technicians.

Mr Hu, 60, has also identified himself recently with the needs of China's poor, putting distance between himself and Mr Jiang.