Following this year's regular top leadership sessions, intended to outline the leadership's priorities for the next twelve months, Premier Li Keqiang faced questions from the international press on the work report he delivered last week, which has since been comprehensively debated by the annual sessions of the National People's Congress (NPC) and the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC).

Chinese Premier Li Keqiang is hosting a press conference at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing.

It was interesting, though perhaps not surprising, that according to Xinhua, "Almost a quarter of questions raised by journalists were related to China's economic development and reforms." Less than a quarter? And yet those themes comprised the great majority of the discussions held at the two major sessions. Journalists (and yes, I am one of those) will tend to look for sensation rather than evidence of solid, unexciting progress. Yet China's leadership is not concerned with giving foreign journalists anything exciting to write about.

Premier Li's work report was deliberately unexciting. There was a lot about deepening reform, boosting consumption and opening up to the outside world. This is not to say that the premier's report was shallow; in fact, a thorough analysis reveals that all aspects of Chinese life were covered, including the modernization and protection of the agriculture which is so essential to the lives of the majority of the population; also the inexorable process of urbanization, as the economy of the great Chinese cities gradually subsumes their surrounding areas.

The premier sketched a three-stage programme of urbanization, consisting of granting urban residency to some 100 million rural people who have moved to the bigger cities but thus far do not possess the formal residency documents; rebuilding rundown city areas and the quasi-rural enclaves within them, where some 100 million people reside; and guiding the urbanization of another 100 million rural residents of the economically backward central and western regions. The premier clearly recognized that in the face of 5,000 years of peasant Chinese history, the future of China is urbanization.