Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao (C) prepares to chat with Internet users on two state news portals in Beijing, China, Feb 28, 2009. Premier Wen Jiabao had a two-hour online chat with netizens starting from 3 pm Saturday. This was the first online chat involving Premier Wen and the public and was the second high-profile online discussion by top Chinese leaders.

The two portals, the central government website (www.gov.cn) and the Xinhua News Agency website (www.xinhuanet.com), jointly held the interview with Premier Wen, which was live shown in both texts and videos.

This was the first online chat involving Premier Wen and the public and was the second high-profile online discussion by top Chinese leaders. President Hu Jintao had a brief Q&A with netizens at the website People's Daily in June last year.

Wen's chat with netizens came just days before the annual session of the National People's Congress and that of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference in Beijing.

This year's "two sessions", convened at a time when the global financial crisis is still spreading, is expected to focus on thorny issues such as escalating jobless rate, social security, medical care, and corruption.

These issues are also well reflected in the nearly 90,000 questions thrown to Wen in the chatroom from netizens around the country.

Govt preparing for officials to declare assets

Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao said the government is making "active preparations" for officials to declare their assets amid efforts to combat corruption.

"We need to promote transparency of government affairs and also need to make public officials' assets," he said.

"Such a declaration system must be established and carried out so as to produce substantial results," he said.

"It should be a major move to fight against corruption." Wen said the most important thing in combating corruption is to establish a good system that can prevent power from being too centralized without restriction.

"Only power is restricted can corruption be prevented fundamentally," he added. Earlier this month, authorities in Altay Prefecture in northwest China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region publicly released a list of the assets of more than 1,000 current and retired officials.

It was hailed as forerunner in the country's declaration system of officials' assets.

Also Saturday, China's top legislature approved a number of criminal law amendments including anti-graft moves.

A new amendment bans relatives of or people who have close relations with government employees from conducting corrupt deals between the employee and bribe-givers.

Offenders in "very serious cases" could face a minimum jail term of seven years, according to the amendment.

Proposed punishments also include fines and confiscation of personal property.

People has right to criticize government

People has the right to criticize government policy and government also needs to be open and democratic in its policy-making, Premier Wen said in the online chat with netizens.

"I always think that people has the right to know what the government is thinking and doing, and voice their criticism of government policy," Wen said in the Internet forum.

Wen said he was nervous because this is his first ever online discussion with netizens, though he surfed the Internet everyday for 30 minutes to one hour.

"But I will always remember my mother's words to be sincere with people. I will talk to you with my heart. I will be honest, that is, I will tell you the true situation and listen to your true voices," he said.

Citing an online poll by Xinhuanet, Wen said he is aware of the fact that corruption is still among netizens' top concern even as the nation is struggling to cope with the financial crisis.

"Mentioning of anti-corruption, I think the most important thing is to solve defects in our system. Corruption can only be rooted out when power is supervised," said Wen.

He announced that the government is making "active preparations" for civil servants to declare their properties, a move that has been anticipated for a long time.

Wen said the government has taken measures to ensure people's participation in major policy-making, for example, public hearings are being held in the drafting of major laws and policies.

Good system matters more than good Premier

Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao responded to the criticism from Chinese netizens on Saturday, admitting that to have seriously ill children rescued, a good medical system would matter more than a good Premier.

The criticism brewed two weeks ago when media reports said that Wen had personally donated 10,000 yuan to Li Rui and arranged for the two-year-old suffering leukaemia from the rural area in Zhangjiakou of Hebei Province to get hospitalized in the Beijing Chidlren's Hospital.

"I noticed the harsh criticism which says good system matters more than good Premier and understood the argument," Wen said, responding to a question on the treatment of seriously ill children in the on-line chat.

 "China has more than four million leukemic children. Treatment for each would cost more than 100,000 yuan. But no medical insurance in China would allow reimbursement for such large medical bills," Wen said.

"Being the Premier, I need to think about how to optimize our medical system and have seriously ill children treated."

"We have already started to work in this direction. But our efforts is far from enough," he said.

Although 90 percent of China's rural residents have been covered by the country's rural medical cooperative mechanism, the per capita reimbursement for serious diseases averages only 100 yuan a year, demanding fiscal expenditure of nearly 10 billion yuan in total.

"The amount will rise to 120 yuan this year. But it will remain to be only a drop in the bucket. The only way is to constantly develop our economy and raise people's income," Wen said.

The Premier said one immediate and viable remedy would be the establishment of a mechanism that can boldly mobilize the masses to come to the rescue of seriously ill children.

Health care reform aims at public interest

Premier Wen said that China will strive to improve the country's health care system to make health care more accessible and affordable.

China's State Council, or Cabinet, passed a long awaited medical reform plan last month which promised to spend 850 billion yuan (US$123 billio) by 2011 to provide universal medical service to the country's 1.3 billion population.

Wen said the plan covers five aspects:

-- Expand the coverage of medical insurance. Increase the amount of rural and urban population covered by the basic medical insurance system or the new rural cooperative medical system to at least 90 percent by 2011.

-- Build a basic medicine system that includes a catalogue of drugs that mostly needed by the public.

-- Improve medical service systems (especially those at the grassroots level). Build another 5,000 clinics at the township level, 2,000 hospitals at the county level and 2,400 urban community clinics in three years.

-- Gradually provide equal public health services in both rural and urban areas in the country.

-- Start to reform public hospitals.

"Health care reform is not easy. Our determination to push forward the reform shows that the government cares about the health of the public," Wen said.

Wen said the principle of the reform is that public medical service must have public good as its goal.