II. Strengthening our oversight work with the focus on facilitating the implementation of the central leadership's major decisions and arrangements

To successfully complete the objectives and tasks set forth in the Eleventh Five-Year Plan, we strengthened oversight of economic work and efforts to ensure and improve the people's wellbeing. We constantly improved the way we exercise oversight and carried out inquiries on three special topics in accordance with the law, thus making our oversight more effective.

1. We strengthened oversight of economic work, focusing on helping transform the pattern of economic development.

Last year, in addition to the established practice of hearing and deliberating the reports on the implementation the country's annual plan and budgets, on the final accounts of the central government, and on auditing work, as well as deliberating and approving the final accounts of the central government, we also heard and deliberated reports on expediting the development of the service sector, developing the culture industry, and national grain security; inspected compliance with the Law on Scientific and Technological Progress, the Law on the Popularization of Agricultural Technology, the Energy Conservation Law, the Law on Promoting Cleaner Production, and Law on the Protection of Investments by Compatriots from Taiwan; and carried out follow-up investigations and studies on the implementation of some major public-funded projects. During the deliberation, members of the Standing Committee emphasized the following three points.

First, we need to make strategic economic restructuring the main orientation of transforming the pattern of economic development more quickly, make significantly developing the service sector the focus of optimizing and upgrading our industrial structure, vigorously support strategic emerging industries, more quickly foster new areas of economic growth, and effectively curb excessively rapid growth of energy-intensive and highly polluting industries.

Second, we need to make increasing our innovation capacity our strategic foundation, focus on making breakthroughs in major scientific research programs and key technologies that affect our country's future development, and strive to capture the technological high ground in the new round of international competition.

Third, we need to greatly improve irrigation and water conservancy, speed up the translation of advances in agricultural science and technology into actual productive forces and widely apply them, constantly increase the contribution of agricultural science and technology to agricultural development, ensure national food security, and foster sustained agricultural development and steady increases in farmers' incomes.