China will fight inflation and crack down on property speculators in the year ahead, state media on Wednesday quoted Premier Wen Jiabao as saying, as the country gave a noisy, chaotic welcome to the Year of the Rabbit. In a speech marking the Lunar New Year holiday and carried in major newspapers, Wen said the government would try to keep overall consumer prices stable but cautioned China would have to deal with thorny problems in 2011.
"Our way ahead will still face many difficulties and problems," Communist Party mouthpiece the People's Daily quoted him as saying. "We must resolve the problems that the people most care about," he added. "We must resolutely prevent prices from rising too fast and unswervingly do a good job of controlling the property market."
The government has vowed repeatedly to tame inflation, a source of social unrest in the past and a major concern for the ruling Communist Party, which prizes stability above all else. Though inflation eased in December to an annual pace of 4.6 percent, economists warn price pressure will continue to mount. Wen, who in previous years has spent the Lunar New Year holiday with everyone from AIDS patients to survivors of 2008's devastating Sichuan earthquake, this year visited an old revolutionary base in the poor central province of Anhui.
The official Xinhua news agency showed pictures of Wen taking a toast with happy villagers and cooking over an enormous wok, wearing a blue checked apron with a rabbit on its front. "Is your household facing any hardships?" state radio quoted Wen as asking a villager, to which he was told everything was great, thanks to "the Party's policies". President Hu Jintao, by contrast, visited the northern province of Hebei. State television showed him at a military base singing patriotic songs with soldiers and making dumplings, an auspicious new year food. He later went to a drought-struck village. Large parts of northern China have been struck by drought this winter. The New York-based Human Rights in China is urging people to mark the holiday by sending messages to 35 activists who are in jail or detention, including Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo, to remind them they are not forgotten.