Premier Defends China’s Policy of Slow Growth

BEIJING — Premier Li Peng, making his first public statement in the debate over economic policy, said in a speech published Tuesday that China should pursue a policy of slow but steady growth.

“You can ask the ordinary folk, do they feel their living standard has fallen? Most think things aren’t going too bad, prices are stable and goods in the markets are abundant,” Li said, defending a two-year-old austerity policy that critics say has slowed the economy too sharply.

“We cannot develop blindly,” the premier added. He said priority should be given to agriculture and the economic infrastructure instead of opening new Special Economic Zones, which have served to foster market-style reforms.

The speech was delivered Aug. 2 to a conference on industrial production but wasn’t published until Tuesday in the party newspaper, the People’s Daily.

After taking the lead in market reforms among socialist countries for the last 10 years, China’s aging leadership is engaged in a heated backstage debate over the course for the next decade.

Foreign diplomats said that several drafts of a new five-year plan for the economy have been written but that none has enough support to win approval of the Communist Party Central Committee.