Zhejiang to keep up pursuit of common prosperity

Zhejiang province will continue to make solid efforts in the pursuit of common prosperity and contribute to its realization across China, said a top official from the province at a news conference in Beijing on Tuesday evening.

Steady progress has been made since Zhejiang was designated as a demonstration zone in May 2021, said Wang Gang, head of the publicity department of the Zhejiang Provincial Committee of the Communist Party of China.

"A series of measures and institutional arrangements have been introduced to address regional, rural-urban and income gaps," Wang said at the conference, which was held during the ongoing 20th National Congress of the Communist Party of China.

In the report he delivered at the opening session of the congress, Xi Jinping listed achieving common prosperity for all as an essential requirement of Chinese modernization.

Among the initiatives Zhejiang has instituted, according to Wang, is the upgraded version of the "mountain and sea coordination and collaboration project", which involves the formulation of customized and preferential policies for the province's 26 counties and districts in the mountainous areas.

While these places cover 44.5 percent of Zhejiang's total area, their GDP accounted for only 9.65 percent of its total in 2020, Wang said.

Under these policies, each place is encouraged to make the most of its existing resources and potential to find the most suitable path for future development.

Tangible results have already been produced. Statistics show that the growth rate of GDP in these 26 counties and districts outpaced the provincial average by 0.7 percent.

"The figure is significant," Wang said. "It means their development is catching up".

The project, first put in place by Xi in the early 2000s when he served as Zhejiang's Party chief, seeks to achieve balanced and coordinated development between different regions through pairing underdeveloped regions ("mountain") with developed ones ("sea") according to their own competitive advantages and resource endowment.

Other initiatives include providing the same services in areas such as medical care to rural residents and encouraging more developed villages to help less developed ones to raise residents' income, Wang said.

For the future, Zhejiang will strive to make the "cake" bigger through high-quality development, further narrow various gaps, enrich the spiritual lives of its residents and carry on providing better services through digital reform, he added.

At the conference, Wang also said Zhejiang will continue to play its part and leverage its advantages in the digital economy, private economy and in natural environment and infrastructure to advance the integrated development of the Yangtze River Delta region.

Qi Xiao contributed to the story