"To better protect the rights and interests of ethnic people, stricter rules and regulations should be made," Amat said.

Minority areas, most in China's western areas, are rich in natural resources. A State Council report on the exploration of resources released on Tuesday says large oilfields with proven reserves of more than 100 million tons have been discovered in the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, with gasfields each having an estimated reserve of more than 100 billion cubic metres being found in Inner Mongolia.

Meanwhile, large and medium-sized non-ferrous mines have been detected in Xinjiang, Tibet and Yunnan, a province with more than 50 minority groups.

But the ethnic regions have 11.7 million people living in extreme poverty, accounting for 49.5 per cent of the country's poor rural residents. And the local gross product of ethnic regions last year was just 8 per cent of the national total, and people in these regions produced only 29.4 per cent of the national average, the legislature's report says.

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