Chinese Premier Forecast 8% Growth in 2010

Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao detailed China’s economic plans on Friday, telling the legislature that the government could expand social spending, increase lending, and pour money into strategic industries. He said China can still meet its traditional 8 percent economic growth target in 2010.

He also sounded a cautionary note, warning that the nation faced structural economic and social problems, saying that China still confronts “a very complex situation” in the wake of last year’s global financial collapse.

Economic and political analysts said there was nothing new revealed in the speech. China Premier Wen Jiabao, and President Hu Jintao will both leave power in 2012.

“There’s no surprise here,” Tao Wang, an economist for USB Securities in Beijing, said: “This has been the working assumption for a long time.”

The premier committed to boosting the nation’s money supply by 17 percent in 2010, increasing lending by $1.1 trillion, but warned that, “latent risks in the banking and public finance sectors are increasing.” Some economists have argued that China’s flood of recessionary lending will create a mountain of bad debt that will hamstring future growth.

Mr. Wen said that China would pour money into strategic industries, boosting research and development and infrastructure spending in areas like biomedicine, energy conservation, information technology and high-end manufacturing.

Mr. Wen also pledged to increase environmental protection measures, planting nearly 23,000 square miles of new forests, expanding sewage treatment, clean drinking water programs, and retrofitting coal-burning power plants with advanced machinery to cut emissions.

China is known to be the world’s single largest polluter.