We have also increased the basic living allowance for people living in difficult circumstances and increased special assistance and allowances for groups who are entitled to them. We have also increased the wages for the 12 million middle and primary school teachers who teach students in the compulsory education period in the Chinese educational system. We want to bring the wages of those teachers up to the level of civil servants.

I think people will be ready to spend when they have money. We also implemented the policy that from January 20 to December 31, 2009, the vehicle purchase tax is halved for buyers of vehicles of 1.6-liter engines or below. On the day when the policy took effect it gave such a strong boost to the sales of automobiles in the Chinese market, and even the inventories were sold out.

Before I turn to the international aspects of this crisis, I have one small question regarding rural China. You visited more than 2,000 Chinese counties, I understand. What specific measures are you taking to assure social stability as unemployment rises and many, many people are returning to the land? And within that question, the last question is about the Agricultural Bank of China. Are you planning to use $800 billion to recapitalize it?

When I was vice premier of the State Council, rural affairs in China were already a part of my portfolio. Since I became the Premier of the State Council, I have always put rural affairs at the forefront of the government agenda.

As you said, the financial crisis has caused some bankruptcies of businesses and also made migrant workers return to the countryside. In total we have about 12 million migrant workers who have returned to rural areas.

Some Western countries may wonder whether this will be a source of social instability. Well, I want to tell you that in China, we have altogether about 200 million migrant workers working in urban areas, and the population of migrant workers searching jobs across provinces is about 120 million.

As I said, about 12 million migrant workers have chosen to return to the countryside because of the financial crisis. As this is a floating population, it is easy to understand that they will come to cities when there are job opportunities there and they will choose to return to the countryside when there aren't.

When they have returned to the countryside you can see that, for most of them, they still have their pieces of farmland. I think land provides the most important safeguard for the lives of those farmers in China.

We should thank those Chinese migrant workers because they made an enormous contribution to China's modernization drive and, in times of this financial crisis, they have also become a big reservoir of the labor force.

With regard to the Agricultural Bank of China (ABC), this is the last among the five major state-owned commercial banks in China to carry out the joint-stock reform.

I want to point out one thing here: It is largely because we started the reform in China's banking sector about 10 years ago that now we have seen that major Chinese banks are in a fairly healthy condition, in terms of the quality and the scale of their assets, the profitability, the proportion of non-performing loans, as well as the flow of capital. We have taken some measures in the past, including reducing non-performing loans in the banks, improving their corporate governance structure and transforming them into shareholding companies.

There are four key priorities in our reform with regard to the ABC. The first is that we must ensure this reform will serve the purpose of agricultural development. Second, we must take continued measures to dispose of non-performing assets. Third, the government will take steps to inject capital into the bank. Fourth, we will undertake the reform of putting in place a corporate governance structure. Our decision on this recapitalization is about $30 billion.

You've outlined some important measures that China has taken to stimulate its economy but the world expects so much of China, and the United States in particular. Last year there was more pressure on China regarding the renminbi, and the U.S. treasury secretary referred to China "manipulating" its currency. Have you received assurances from U.S. President Barack Obama that the United States will be more accommodating, and what do you say to those charges that you are manipulating your own money?

It is completely unfounded to allege that China is manipulating its currency exchange rate. We have started to conduct the reform in China's exchange rate regime from the second half of 2005. With more than three years of the reform, the renminbi has appreciated by 21 percent in actual terms against the dollar and 12 percent against the euro.