Top leaders of the Communist Party of China stand to attention to sing the National Anthem at the start of the Party's 17th National Congress in Beijing on Monday. - Xinhua

China will step up reform to reverse the growing gap between rich and poor, Hu Jintao, general secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, said yesterday.

"We will increase transfer payments, intensify the regulation of incomes through taxation, break business monopolies, create equal opportunities and overhaul income-distribution practices," he said.

Hu was addressing the 17th National Congress of the Party, which opened yesterday in Beijing.

The congress will map out China's all-round development for the next five years.

More than 2,000 delegates from 38 delegations nationwide are attending.

High on the agenda is a draft amendment to the Party Constitution to reflect the scientific outlook on development and new achievements in the Party's theoretical innovation and progress in practice. The congress will elect the 17th Central Committee that will decide the Party's new leadership lineup for the next few years.

The congress, which comes to an end on Sunday, will also elect a new Central Commission for Discipline Inspection.

Hu stressed that equitable income distribution is an important indication of social equity.

"Vigorous efforts will be made to raise the income of low-income groups, gradually increase poverty-alleviation aid and the minimum wage and set up a mechanism of regular pay increases for enterprise employees," he said.

He pledged that conditions will be created to enable more citizens to have property income, and the Party will protect lawful incomes, regulate excessively high incomes and ban illegal gains.

Hu detailed other plans for social development with the focus on improving people's livelihood, to ensure that all the people enjoy their rights to education, employment, medical and age care, and housing, so as to build a harmonious society.

He said the country will promote balanced development of compulsory education and move faster towards universal access to senior secondary education, a step further than the current nine-year compulsory education.

The country will also work to ensure that children of poor families and rural migrant workers in cities enjoy the same access to compulsory education as other children.

Hu promised to establish a unified, standardized labor market and a mechanism that ensures equal employment opportunities for both urban and rural residents.

The country will also improve employment assistance to the needy and make it a priority to help zero-employment families to have job opportunities.

It will also improve the low-rent housing system and speed up resolution of the housing difficulties of low-income families in urban areas.

The country will maintain the public-welfare nature of public medical and health-care services, always put disease prevention first, center on rural areas and attach equal importance to traditional Chinese medicine and Western medicine, Hu said.

China has made spectacular economic gains since the reform and opening drive launched three decades ago, but the countryside lags, causing concern that the urban and rural gap might undermine social harmony.

From 2002 to 2006, the per capita income of farmers has risen by an annual average of 6.2 percent. For the first time since 1985, the growth rate has exceeded 6 percent for three straight years.

But the gap is still widening. The income of urban residents in 2006 was 3.28 times that of rural people, up from 3.22 in 2005 and 3.21 in 2004.

The country's richest 10 percent of families have more than 40 percent of the nation's wealth and the poorest 10 percent have only two percent.