China's top political leader Xi Jinping called on Tuesday for the courage to "wade through a dangerous shoal" to help deepen reforms in the country's development.

While joining national legislators from China's economic hub of Shanghai to deliberate on the Government Work Report, Xi compared the difficulty facing the country's deepened reform and opening-up to that of "storming a fortification".

The report was delivered on Tuesday morning by Premier Wen Jiabao at the parliament's annual session.

"We must have the courage, like gnawing at a hard bone and wading through a dangerous shoal," said Xi, who is general secretary of the Communist Party of China Central Committee.

The government should give more respect to the law of the market and play a better role in advancing reform and opening-up, Xi said.

While deliberating the Government Work Report, Xi stressed the importance of innovation and technology in breaking through the bottleneck for development and solving deeply rooted problems.

Government and society should facilitate innovation with a global vision to come up with core technologies to drive industrial development, he added.

While joining a panel discussion with lawmakers from Shandong province, Vice-Premier Li Keqiang said that to solve problems and continue to advance a sustained, healthy development of the economy, the key is to speed up economic transformation, push for industrialization, informatization, urbanization and agricultural modernization in a synchronized way. It was important to achieve coordinated development between urban and rural areas, Li said.

He said urbanization and agricultural modernization are complementary to each other.

"We should improve the productivity of the countryside while enhancing the capacity of cities to accommodate people," he said.

"We must work harder to improve the livelihood of the people, and boost the living standards of urban and rural residents while pushing economic development," Li added.

Vice-Premier Zhang Dejiang also stressed that urban and rural development should be integrated and the rural-urban gap narrowed in building a moderately prosperous society.

While participating in the panel discussion of National People's Congress deputies from Zhejiang province, Zhang said the development of rural areas and agriculture as well as raising incomes of farmers should not be neglected.

Yu Zhengsheng, a member of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee, said urbanization should be carried out in an active yet steady way to "orderly push forward the transition of the rural population into urban residents".

While joining the panel discussion with NPC deputies from Hubei province, Yu said the will of farmers must be fully respected and no urbanization work should be carried out forcefully.

(China Daily 03/06/2013 page2)