I don't think journalists attending Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao's press conference on Monday should complain about lacking a fair opportunity to ask a question.

In about two hours and 40 minutes, Wen answered 12 questions, six of them from the international media.

Some people have calculated that he has taken up to 60 questions from foreign journalists alone in his nine meetings with the press at these annual sessions since he took office in 2003; this accounts for nearly half of all queries.

Very few heads of government have been as open, I believe.

I attended a press conference by US President Barack Obama at the end of the G20 summit in Toronto last year. I sat in the front row and kept raising my hand. However, to my disappointment, of seven journalists given a chance to ask a question six were from the US media and one from Kyodo News.

Some questions, such as those about the next day's US Supreme Court confirmation hearings of Elena Kagan, were purely of domestic concern. They had very little to do with the G20 summit, at which the leaders tried to push forward global economic recovery.

Clearly, China now deems openness a good way to make itself better understood.

In fact, China's legislature, the National People's Congress (NPC), and the country's top advisory body, the National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), opened this year's annual sessions to more than 3,000 journalists from across China and the world.

Journalists from the international media are well aware of the problems in China. On Monday, they grilled Premier Wen about China's measures to rein in inflation, restructure its economy, manage housing prices, the possible revaluation of the RMB and political reform.

In addition to opening the group sessions, the NPC and the CPPCC arranged for at least 25 press conferences, at which journalists could glean more details from government department officials, NPC deputies and CPPCC members.

Such openness is required following China's rise to being one of the largest economies in the world. Few journalists could afford to miss Wen's pledges and China's development blueprint for the next five years. Many reported that the prospects for China's economy in the next five years were encouraging.

No doubt, agendas vary according to the media organization. However, there is still the curious difference between some Western media and their Chinese counterparts.

For the Westerners, "human rights" is a common phrase in a story on China. For Chinese journalists, rights issues are not taboo. However, in contrast to Western journalists' highlighting of the fate of a few "activists", their Chinese counterparts concentrate on the problems hindering the national effort to improve the well-being of the populace and bridge the urban-rural divide.

While the problems are pinpointed, role models are also honored because they are the ones who come up with possible solutions or pilot projects.

An example is Sun Dong, 36 and a resident with visual impairment in Shandong province. Last year, he submitted a six-page proposal in Braille to the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) during the drafting of the 12th Five-Year Plan (2011-2015), calling for improvements in education for blind people.

Or 77-year-old Zhang Hongbo, a retired engineer. Despite suffering from terminal cancer, Zhang wrote a 40,000-character thesis on how to bridge the income divide and delivered it to the NDRC.

Bi Hongzhen is a farmer and an NPC deputy from Gansu province. Her suggestion to have the central government start a special fund to improve terraced farm fields has been turned into a national project.

Under the project, farmers in eight counties in Gansu saw their grain harvests increase dramatically. Today, the project has spread to 70 counties in 20 provinces, benefiting hundreds of thousands of farmers.

China's continuous development and reforms depend largely on the people who find solutions and work to resolve the hurdles that hinder social, economic and even political progress.