China's annual two sessions play a strategic role in setting important guidelines for China's future development, local experts have told Xinhua in recent interviews.

The annual sessions of China's National People's Congress (NPC) and the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) are underway in Beijing.

"As the highest organ of state power, the NPC plays an important role in defining China's economic development trends, the annual budget's investments in key sectors and other topmost priorities," observed Flora Sapio of the Center of Advanced Studies on Contemporary China (CASCC) based in Turin.

The NPC was the country's top legislature, she said, and its centrality lay in that it approved plans for the country's development and contributed to formulating future economic and development objectives.

In her view, the two sessions stand as key events of China's political, socioeconomic system and as important symbols of the country's growing internal debate and desire to open up.

"In recent years, the NPC's role has been paving the way to further reforms, and is now trying to re-adjust income distribution to reduce China's social gap and poverty level," she said.

For Giovanni Andornino, professor of West Asia International Relations at Turin University and a major scholar on China, the two sessions represent important events envisaged by the Chinese constitution, which are crucial in paving the way toward change by outlining China's upcoming economic and social goals.

Sapio noted the essential cooperation between the Communist Party and the NPC and how this strengthened the central action of the Chinese government on the whole.

"If on one hand the central party leaders decide the general political orientation to follow, on the other the NPC defines those policies having an impact on the economy and society, on social stability, economic development, education and law. The NPC has an important impact in the actualization of the central political decisions," she said.

"The NPC and the CPPCC, with its consultative role, are places of discussion and internal debate, confrontation and dialogue on key issues that demonstrate China's desire to build a stronger internal consensus."

The annual assemblies' importance was demonstrated by the media attention in China, Sapio said.

"Since the reform period, the two sessions have played an important role in the life of China and its citizens. It is during these events that the main decisions are taken, they represent the heart of the strategic definition of the country's economic and industrial development roadmap," she said.

Sapio said the main challenges were social stability, and the reduction of China's poverty and social gap, adjustments to income distribution and the transformation of China from an export-based economy to a more sustainable development model. "China is moving from being the world's clothing factory," she said.

According to Andornino, the NPC's expected approval of China's 12th Five-Year Plan (2011-2015) will pave the way toward a radical change in the country's economic structure.

"China's leadership has set itself the ambitious objective of reducing the country's dependence on carbon fossils and exports by boosting internal consumption rates, both for geopolitical reasons but especially to spread social and environmental well-being by having the highest number of people benefit from the economic growth," he said.

It was not only a matter of creating more wealth but of better distributing welfare and improving the Chinese people's conditions on the whole, he said.