All Party officials working in China's villages, towns, urban communities and neighborhood committees will attend a training session on "social management" in order to address prominent social problems, safeguard citizens' rights and promote social fairness.

The social management training that started in May and will continue for a year, covers Party secretaries of the country's more than 40,000 township and neighborhood committees of the Communist Party of China (CPC) and 680,000 village and community Party organizations, according to the Organization Department of the CPC Central Committee.

"To maintain social stability and harmony at the grassroots level, local Party organizations must play the role of 'fighting forts,'" said Li Yuanchao, head of the CPC Central Committee's Organization Department and a member of the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee, at the training's opening session on May 18.

A total of 256 grassroots Party officials attended the session held from May 18 to 29 in Beijing.

Courses cover subjects such as explanations of frequently-used laws and regulations, experience and lessons learned from mass work and methods dealing with mass incidents and Internet opinion.

Some Party cadres said during the training more attention should be given to "rural land misappropriation, urban house demolition, migrant population and the urban and rural income gap."

"Efforts should be made to boost people's income, sense of security and feeling of happiness," said a village Party official.

Chinese leaders have increasingly focused on social management in order to alleviate tension caused by imbalanced income distribution.

The top leadership called for strengthening and innovation of social management and improving services for the country's migrant population and people with "special needs" as well as non-public economic organizations and social groups in a meeting held by the CPC Central Committee Political Bureau earlier this week.

"Improving and innovating in the area of social management is closely related to consolidating the ruling status of the Party, the country's lasting stability and people's livelihoods," said a statement of the meeting, presided over by CPC Central Committee General Secretary Hu Jintao.

The meeting acknowledged that the concept, mechanism, laws and methods of social management in China were "inappropriate" in many ways, and "urgent and lasting efforts" were needed to improve social management.

It was the third top leadership meeting on social management in eight months after a group study of the top leadership on Sept. 29, 2010 and a special seminar attended by provincial and ministerial leaders on Feb. 19.

Such high attention of Party leaders on social management was "unprecedented," especially when China faces "strategic opportunities" and increasing social conflict, said netizen "Laochunshen" in an online posting.

"Authorities should focus on new phenomena in the social sphere, including mass incidents, prominent social contradictions and new development trends," "Bingshuibing" said online.

"China's rapid growth over the past three decades equals the hundreds of years of development path of Western developed nations, so many problems having emerged in the West in different stages are collectively shown in China in a much shorter period," said Prof. Zhu Li of the Department of Sociology of Nanjing University in the eastern Jiangsu Province.

Therefore, he said that it's important to establish a mechanism for Party officials to "sink into the masses" to solve conflicts.