Family planning and environmental protection are China’s basic state policies and vital to improving the quality of people’s lives. We should concentrate our efforts on the management of family planning and related services in rural areas and among the floating population so as to control population growth. We should improve prenatal and postnatal care and foster physical fitness among the population.We must tighten control over and protection of arable land, water, forests, grasslands, and mineral, sea and biological resources. We should institute a system of paid use of natural resources to ensure economical and rational uses. We should strictly deal with and control pollution and speed up pollution treatment in major regions and river valley. We should publish standards for monitoring environmental quality in large cities.
A country with a large population, relative insufficiency of natural resources and an expanding economy, China suffers an increasingly significant disparity between economic development on the one hand and natural resources and the environment on the other. It poses problems if we continue to maintain a merely quantitative and crude mode of development in our economic growth. We, therefore, must correctly handle the relationships between economic development on the one hand, and population growth, natural resources consumption and the environmental protection on the other. We should exploit our natural resources more rationally and make use of them in an integrated manner. We should do our best to protect and improve our ecological environment, so as to ensure that our economic development will not only meet the current needs of this generation, but benefit future generations.