Beijing announced new targets to improve energy efficiency, curb carbon emissions and combat widespread pollution in the next five years amid mounting concerns over the environmental impact of the mainland's runaway economic growth.
Most notably, the government for the first time committed itself to reducing carbon emissions per unit of gross domestic product, a measure of carbon intensity, by 17 per cent from the 2010 level by 2015.
The inclusion of the mandatory carbon intensity target in the nation's new five-year plan is seen as a big compromise and the result of intense international pressure on China, the world's top carbon polluter, to accept mandatory carbon caps.
Until now China has insisted carbon targets would hurt its economic development. All it had pledged was to reduce the economy's carbon intensity by 40 to 45 per cent from 2005 levels, and then only by 2020.
Yesterday, Premier Wen Jiabao warned National People's Congress delegates that energy supply constraints and wasteful power use threatened sustainable development and China's ability to tackle global warming.
'Total energy and resource consumption remains too high and is still growing rapidly,' he said.
Energy intensive and heavily polluting industries had grown strongly in the past three years despite the government's repeated calls to change the mainland's economic growth model, Wen admitted.