A Politburo meeting chaired by President Hu Jintao yesterday discussed ways to 'strengthen and innovate' social management, state media reported.
The high-level meeting on the issue by the Communist Party's top decision-makers came in the wake of several high-profile cases of public disturbance and violent unrest following years of mounting social tensions across the mainland.
At the meeting, Hu and other party leaders acknowledged that the mainland was in 'a period of prominent social contradictions, [making] the task of social management all the more arduous', Xinhua reported. The state news agency did not attribute the remarks to individual leaders, instead reporting them as the consensus reached at the meeting.
Better social management was key to 'constantly meeting the people's daily increasing materialistic needs', it said, adding that the party's performance in the task would affect its long-term ability to rule.
'[Social management] would affect the party's ruling status, the country's long-term stability and the people's prosperity,' the report said.
The term 'social management' - first introduced by Hu at a Politburo meeting in February - has become a buzzword used by the central government as a euphemism for social controls aimed at defusing tensions between a disenfranchised public and their political overlords.
Those tensions - which have been growing steadily as inflation, housing prices and rampant development take their toll on the public mood - have peaked in recent months in many areas, culminating in a series of incidents this month.