The Beijing municipal government, apparently longing for an image of efficiency, cleanliness and transparency, yesterday announced a programme for creating 340,000 jobs this year and began soliciting feedback from the public.

This job creation programme, which was announced with 55 other programmes, is expected to help bring down the city's registered unemployment rate of 5.9 percent, 1.9 percentage points higher than the national warning limit.

The posts are expected to be shared by 180,000 new job-seekers, such as university graduates, and 160,000 layoffs, including 50,000 people over 40 years of age, said sources with the local government.

Among the new posts in Beijing, a total of 100,000 will be created in the city's residential communities, as the second phase of a three-year development plan on expanding employment in those areas.

The government began to collect suggestions and complaints from local residents yesterday and will do so until Saturday, to make government affairs more open and transparent.

Beijingers can express their views by telephone, e-mail and with letters, as the number and address for those services were released yesterday as well.

The job-creation programme is only one of the government's 56 specific projects for the welfare of the public in 2004. The projects were released on the government's website.

Sources with the municipal government said that the 56 projects will receive inspections in the middle of the year, and receive supervision from society at the end of the year to see whether the goals were achieved.

Traffic, environment, agriculture, food safety, public security and cultural relics protection, which are all closely related to the daily lives of local residents, are the focus of the specific projects to benefit society.

Among the five environmental protection-related projects, what excites residents most may be the government's promise to strengthen control over air pollution.

It is predicted that over 62 per cent of the days next year in urban Beijing will reach or better the level II national standard indicating good air quality. That figure is 2 percentage points higher than that of last year, the plan said.

Meanwhile, three areas that suffered from serious noise concerns will be equipped with sound insulating facilities this year. The areas include the Beidadi Section of the Fourth Ring Road, the Huixin Dongjie Street section of the Fourth Ring Road and the section of the Beijing-Chengde Highway connecting the Third and Fourth ring roads, sources said.

Furthermore, Beijing will implement an all-round garbage classification system from this year to make garbage treatment harmless to the environment.

Garbage in 260 residential areas and office buildings, where about 780,000 people live, will be collected under different categories this year.

Beijing vowed in a white book statement last month that over 98 per cent of daily garbage will be treated in a way that will be harmless to environment by 2008, not simply piled in open and buried in the earth as it is now.

Concerning waste water treatment, five new treatment plants in Beiyuan, Dingfuzhuang, Dongba, Fatou and Wulituo will start construction this year after public bidding.

Residents living in the capital city's rural areas will also be involved in the system for ensuring a minimum standard of living, the same as those residents living in urban Beijing.

A total of 50,000 non-agricultural working posts will be provided to citizens living in the suburbs, as well as 100,000 times of employment training.

In the field of healthcare which is also a long-existing problem in the countryside, it is vowed that 60 per cent of residents will be guaranteed treatment under the co-operative medical system.

Eleven famous hospitals in urban Beijing will assist 11 counterparts in rural areas to merge district and county-level hospitals into regional medical centres with their different characteristics.

A total of 40 ambulances will be equipped for medical services in Beijing's mountainous areas.

It has become a common practice for the Beijing municipal government to release dozens of projects to the public at the beginning of a year and solicit public opinion.

"I think it is a good way for the government to communicate with residents and to let us know what they will do in a new year for us,'' Beijing resident Wang Yan said.

It is expected that the items of the projects will be adjusted in accordance with residents' requests.

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