Unlike the memorable 1998 press conference where Chinese Premier Zhu Rongji launched the first year of his ambitious reformist administration, his last encounter with the press yesterday before he hands over power next year, was short on sublime rhetoric and venomous attacks on the bureaucratic establishment.

On the contrary, the 73-year-old premier, who enters the last year of his five-year term, looked under pressure to defend himself and his policies against accusations that run the gamut from incurring a huge budget deficit to ignoring the fate of China's 900 million peasants.

Although Zhu remains in power until the next session of the National People's Congress (NPC) in March 2003, his successor will almost certainly be decided much earlier — at the Communist Party's 16th congress in the fall.

The 11-day NPC session, which ended in Beijing yesterday, is seen as the last major political gathering before sweeping leadership changes in the next six months reveal the outline of the new generation of Chinese leaders.

As the countdown to political transition begins, so has the reckoning of Zhu's four years of powerful administration, which saw China riding out the Asian financial storm and becoming a member of the World Trade Organisation.

Yet, along with these achievements, there remain Zhu's failures to restructure China's agricultural sector along the market lines and address the grievances of the country's largest social class — the peasantry.

When delivering he delivered his first address to the media as premier in 1998, Zhu was eloquent in his pledges to fight the bloated bureaucracy, curb corruption and let market forces reign in China's state industries and monopoly on grain.

''Whether there are landmines or an abyss in front of me, I will press on courageously with no hesitation and misgivings,'' Zhu had said. The defiance of the system by one single person seemed unthinkable in China's four thousand years of bureaucratic culture.

Four years on, if not defeated, Zhu seems acutely aware of his limitations and the lack of rhetoric in his press conference Friday reveals a shattered confidence.

Parting with the tradition of previous years, Zhu skipped the usual address to the media and dispensed with the charm offensives that have marked all his press conferences in recent years.

Deficit premier

Fending off questions for an hour, Zhu sounded unfazed but bitter — and only a sparkle or two of his well-known self-deprecating humour brightened the whole sober atmosphere of the assessment of his administration.

''I had been awarded the honourable title of China's Deficit Premier by a certain Hong Kong media,'' Zhu argued. ''But let me tell you that had we not adopted this pro-active fiscal policy in the wake of Asian financial crisis, Chinese economy would have collapsed.''

Detractors have charged that Zhu's expansionary financial policy in the last four years has incurred a record budget deficit of 309.8 billion yuan ( RM140.6 billion). Most of the money was spent on stimulating growth by financing a series of infrastructure projects and developing China's impoverished western provinces.

During the annual session of the National People's Congress, voices were heard against any further expansion, saying government intervention has failed to arrest the slowing of the economy. The Chinese economy grew by 7.3 percent last year — down from eight percent in 2000, with growth slowing each year.

''An enormous budget deficit and large debt burden will finally cause a financial crisis, in the form of runaway inflation like Russia in the 1990s,'' Yu Zuyao, a delegate from Beijing and a member of the NPC's Finance Committee, wrote in the China Economic Times .

''This loose monetary policy only treats the symptoms but not the disease, like keeping a dying patient alive,'' he said.

Zhu, however, sounded upbeat on the future of China's economic development and promised that the economy would have 7.5 percent growth in the first quarter of this year.

Recounting how China weathered the Asian financial storm, Zhu said what happened in its aftermath only showed that ''the intensity of government's fiscal policy has been just right''.

''I'm sorry but I would have to give you back that 'honourable title' of Deficit Premier,'' Zhu said.

Peasants issue

The premier however, sounded defeated when he conceded that his administration has so far failed to address one of the country's most pressing social problems — the plight of 900 million Chinese peasants.

''The one single issue that causes me most headache is how to increase peasants' incomes,'' Zhu confessed.

He had highlighted the rural crisis in his work report read out in the beginning of the NPC's annual session. The growth of rural incomes has slowed each year since 1997 while income disparity has surged.

Today, the gap between rural and urban incomes in China is the highest in the world. The average urban citizen earns nearly three times his rural countryman, against a world norm of one to 1.6.

Zhu promised to expand the experimental tax-for-fee reform, intended to reduce farmers' financial burden.

He also pledged to increase poverty alleviation funds to the countryside and investment for small-scale rural infrastructure, in order to boost the competitiveness of China's agriculture sector.

Yet Zhu did not mention any new policies to help China's 900 million rural people and refrained from giving a timetable for raising farmers' incomes.

Instead, he fell back on a popular maxim of China's late paramount leader Deng Xiaoping, which says that wealth disparity is inevitable. (IPS)