The Poster News APP:

Five-year plans are as much a matter of the country as they are for every household. Over the next five years, in the fields of public services such as education, health care and social security, what key measures will be introduced to give the public a stronger sense of gain? Thank you.

Zheng Bei:

No matter is too small when it comes to the people's well-being. I would like to invite Mr. Liu to answer this question.

Liu Dechun:

Thank you for your question. Public services concern the most immediate, practical and vital interests of the people. China has set the goal of achieving equal access to basic public services by 2035, which is an important requirement for basically realizing socialist modernization. The draft Outline of the 15th Five-Year Plan makes a series of arrangements in the areas of education, health care and social security.

Specifically, in terms of education, efforts will be made to accelerate improvements to the education resource allocation mechanism that adapts to population changes. We aim to increase the average schooling years of the working-age population by another 0.4 years, raising it from the current 11.3 years to 11.7 years. Basic education will focus more on expanding excellence and improving quality. We will comprehensively promote high-quality, inclusive preschool education, and high-quality, balanced compulsory education. We will steadily expand access to free education, explore extending the years of compulsory education, and build, renovate or expand 1,000 high-quality senior high schools. The focus in vocational education will be on industry-education integration. We will support the establishment of 500 new high-level industry-education integration training bases, deepen industry-education integration and school-enterprise cooperation, and promote vocational education to match industrial needs in terms of scale, structure and quality. The focus in higher education will be on improving quality and expanding capacity. We will moderately expand our initiative to develop world-class universities and academic disciplines, support efforts to foster new research-oriented universities, promote high-level collaboration with overseas universities to establish joint institutions and programs in China, and increase the enrollment scale of high-quality undergraduate education in an orderly manner.

In health care, we will continue to strengthen public health capabilities, optimize the roles and layout of medical institutions, and work toward raising average life expectancy to 80 years — bringing it broadly in line with that of high-income countries. Our efforts will focus on three key areas: First, we will strengthen the foundation of medical and health care services by building 1,000 integrated county-level medical communities to meet the public's needs for medical treatment near their homes. Second, we will expand and improve rehabilitation and nursing care. We will support a number of secondary-level hospitals in cities to develop specialized services such as rehabilitation and nursing care based on their actual conditions, while also comprehensively strengthening the construction of multi-level and diversified rehabilitation, nursing and hospice care service systems. Third, we will balance the distribution of high-quality medical resources. Efforts will be made to enhance the quality and efficiency of 125 national regional medical centers, while supporting a number of high-level provincial hospitals in strengthening their clinical diagnosis and treatment capabilities and fully realizing their potential. These measures aim to ensure that patients can receive treatment for major illnesses within their own province.

In terms of social security, we will steadily promote the expansion and upgrading of social security coverage, and firmly safeguard the bottom line of basic livelihoods. The focus of expansion will be on enlarging the coverage of unemployment and work-related injury insurance, establishing and improving the occupational injury protection system, and increasing the participation rate of flexible employees, migrant workers and those in new forms of employment. The focus of upgrading will be on improving the determination and adjustment mechanism of basic pension insurance benefits, gradually increasing the basic pension for urban and rural residents, and reasonably raising the subsidy standards for urban and rural residents' medical insurance.

In the next five years, we will move forward with people-centered new urbanization, improve mechanisms for allocating public resources according to the size of permanent resident population, promote the effective coverage of basic urban public services to ensure they cover all permanent residents, narrow the gap in basic public services between urban and rural areas, so as to ensure that rural areas enjoy the same basic public services as urban areas. Thank you.