CHINA: China's outgoing Prime Minister, Mr Zhu Rongji, warned that the country's peasants and migrant workers could wreck the economic boom if they were not given a better deal.
Opening the nation's ritual parliamentary meeting, he said: "We must do everything possible to increase farmers' incomes and lighten their burden."
He told the 3,000 delegates seated in the cavernous Great Hall of the People to rubber-stamp the biggest transfer of power in a decade.
The National People's Congress is to approve a raft of reforms, mostly designed to help the hundreds of millions of peasants and workers left behind in the scramble for wealth.
This year's meeting will be dominated by a grand personnel reshuffle. Over half the top government jobs will handed over to China's "fourth generation", anointed at a Communist Party meeting held in November.
Only President Jiang Zemin will hang on to his job of heading the military, although he is 76, but he relinquishes the ceremonial state presidency to his heir, Mr Hu Jintao (60), who is now the general secretary of the Communist Party. Standing down will be the men, now in their mid-70s, who steered China out of the trough following the crushing of the 1989 Tiananmen Square democracy movement.
Those who remember the party's second-ranking leader, Mr Li Peng, triumphantly hailing the tanks may be pleased to see him finally vacate the stage.
Others may regret Premier Zhu's departure because, more than anyone, he has masterminded the transformation of China's economy into a global trading power.
The histrionic and often choleric Mr Zhu, who was once a political prisoner, famously announced when he took office that he would deal with corruption by preparing 99 coffins for his enemies and one for himself.
Not all of his reforms have been a success but he credits himself, perhaps with reason, with saving China from economic collapse.
Over the last 10 years, he curbed runaway inflation with a tough austerity campaign and then rescued it from the 1997 Asian financial crisis and deepening deflation with a Keynesian programme of public works that is set to continue.
His ruthless reforms of the public sector have thrown 30 million out of work, with factory closures on a massive scale and a pruning of the multi-tiered bureaucracy - though some complain he did not go far enough.
Yet Mr Zhu battled strong resistance as he forced through the end of state planning, broke up monopolies, and introduced competition and deregulation across the entire economy.
China has run up huge deficits and accumulated bad loans on a Japanese scale, but foreign investment has poured in. While the state sector remains far from profitable, the country is poised for a new and more daring round of privatisation.
In his final speech, Mr Zhu called for efforts to spread prosperity in the countryside, create more jobs and build a safety net for the poor and unemployed.
While he promised 7 per cent economic growth this year, he emphasised that the government needed to do more about stagnant incomes among the 800 million rural poor - and must pay the accumulated back wages owed to many teachers and civil servants.
A key reform is a new tax system for farmers, who pay proportionately more than any other group. These and other measures are conceived as ways of boosting consumer spending, which, Mr Zhu stressed, must take over from government spending as the main engine of economic growth.
China's political system has barely changed in 20 years but the incoming generation - men in their 40s and 50s who grew up in the Cultural Revolution - may dare to risk fresh experiments.
Already on the table are plans to commercialise the state-owned media and to grant the rump non-communist political parties a bigger share of government jobs, including the symbolic job of vice-president.
On first sight the incoming leadership shows no signs of nursing any radical streak.
The new premier will be a quiet committee man, Mr Wen Jiabao, and the new head of the national people's congress is Mr Wu Bangguo, an electronics engineer who spent his career running state industries.
The majority of the new intake are engineers, graduates from a handful of elite universities, handpicked by President Jiang to share his vision of China as a modern, technology-driven society, with an economic system largely modelled on America's and a government of self-selected technocrats.