Setting the 8-percent target mainly "aims at ensuring the quality of economic growth, focusing on transformation of the economic growth pattern and adjustment of the economic structure," said Mr Wen in his report to the National People's Congress (NPC).

The rise in the consumer price index, the main gauge of inflation, will be held to around 3 percent, the premier said. Although the development environment this year may be better than 2009, China ‘will still face a complicated situation’, Wen said.

2010 will be a ‘crucial but complicated’ year for China's economic development as the country will continue getting beyond the global financial crisis while maintaining a stable and comparatively fast economic growth and accelerating transformation of the growth pattern, he said.

Peter Trebitsch, a reporter from the Hungarian News Agency Corporation, noted that China is giving more attention to quality of growth, instead of focusing only on expansion. The key to economic growth pattern transformation, however, lies in implementation of policies at grassroots level, he said.

As the first country to emerge from the global economic downturn, China's gross domestic product (GDP) rose 8.7 percent in 2009 from a year earlier, above the 8-percent target the government set at the beginning of last year.

Xinhua