China counts cost of growth China's Communist Party, devoted in recent years to expanding the economy at any cost, on Wednesday endorsed a new doctrine of harmony that puts more emphasis on tackling the severe side effects of unrestrained growth. The annual meeting of the ruling party's Central Committee formally adopted President Hu Jintao's proposal to 'build a harmonious socialist society,' a move that some analysts said marks one of the most decisive shifts since the late paramount leader Deng Xiaoping accelerated the party's push for high growth rates in the early 1990s. The leadership declared that a range of social concerns, including the surging wealth gap, corruption, pollution and access to education and medical care, must be placed on a par with economic growth in party theory and government policy. 'There are many conflicts and problems affecting social harmony,' the Central Committee said in a statement released after the close of their four-day planning session Wednesday. 'Our party has to be more proactive in recognizing and dissolving these contradictions.' China's economy has recently been expanding at better than a 10 percent annual pace, faster than any other major economy in the world, and the party shows no signs of attempting to sharply reduce that rate soon. China needs much higher growth rates than most developed countries to absorb tens of millions of surplus workers, and even the plans for addressing environmental problems and creating a sounder welfare system assume surging tax revenues that will fill government coffers. 'A harmonious society above all needs development,' the statement said. But the 'harmonious society' theme contains a multitude of political cues that have become essential to Hu as he consolidates his power. He has campaigned doggedly to reduce the party's addiction to state-backed investment projects, politically driven expansion of industry and infrastructure, and conversion of state-owned land for speculative real estate development. The fear is that many such projects generate poor economic returns and add to China's pollution problems, already among the worst in the world. Local officials have tended to ignore central directives on creating a more sustainable and less-speculation driven economy, partly because they still believe they will not get promoted unless they can show stellar results expanding output in their domains. Hand in hand with the 'harmonious society' drive, Hu and Zeng Qinghong, the vice president and the head of the party's secretariat, have undertaken the most sustained crackdown on official corruption since the party first embraced market-oriented economic measures nearly three decades ago. The anti-corruption sweep has already resulted in the detention of Chen Liangyu, the powerful party boss of Shanghai, as well as senior officials in Beijing, Tianjin, Fujian, Hunan and other places. The Central Committee statement did not commit the leadership to specific targets in reducing the wealth gap beyond stating that it would need to see improvement by the year 2020. But analysts say the new platform. should result in markedly increased government spending on education and health care, which tend to be expensive and inaccessible to peasants, migrant workers and etirees, the vast majority of China's population. Mao Shoulong, a public policy expert at People's University, said Hu was likely to face continuing obstacles in implementing his plans. 'China is still a poor country that faces many of the problems of rich countries with far more resources,' Mao said. 'It is not so easy to change the focus on the leadership at this stage of development.' China's Communist Party endorsed a new doctrine of harmony on Wednesday.