Chinese vice president: China expected to achieve 8% growth rate

BRUSSELS, Oct. 9 (Xinhua) -- Visiting Chinese Vice President Xi Jinping said here on Friday that China was likely to achieve the targeted annual economic growth of 8 percent.

Xi made the remarks when speaking to representatives from overseas Chinese compatriots and students and Chinese enterprises operating in Belgium.

"We have been actively coping with the international financial crisis and taken a series of effective measures to ensure that China's economy can stabilize and move towards the right direction," Xi said.

Thanks to a package of effective macro-control measures and rescue plans, China recorded in the first half of this year a 7.1-percent growth in gross domestic product (GDP), he noted.

Developing in such a pace, "we can achieve the expected annual growth of 8 percent," he said, adding that China still needed to do more to promote sound and rapid development of its economy as uncertainties in the country's and world's economic picture remained.

Xi also talked about the progress of the reconstruction work in Sichuan province, where a catastrophic earthquake on May 12, 2008 caused more than 69,000 deaths, over 374,600 injuries and millions of economic losses.

A key victory was achieved over the past year concerning reconstruction in the southwestern province, he said.

Xi noted that 99 percent of the more than 180 million destroyed houses were under construction, 92 percent of over 160 million dilapidated houses or buildings were completed and nearly 3.5 million damaged houses were all repaired.

As a result, the Chinese government decided to finish the reconstruction work in the earthquake-hit areas within two years, one year ahead of schedule, Xi told his audience.