President emphasizes enhancing work safety

President Xi Jinping underlined on Friday the importance of tightening supervision of workplace safety as work and production is resumed amid the COVID-19 outbreak.

He urged efforts to strengthen monitoring and law enforcement of production safety, enhance the implementation of enterprises' liability and hold to the bottom line of safety in production so as to honestly protect people's lives and property.

Xi made the remarks in an instruction which was read at a national teleconference on production safety. He said that last year, the total number of nationwide production-related accidents as well as large and especially serious accidents continued to decline. Large accidents indicates are those causing at least three but fewer than 10 deaths, and especially serious accidents are those causing at least 30 deaths.

Xi stressed that while production safety is further improving, there are still many potential risks requiring plenty of work to be done.

Saying life is of paramount importance, Xi, also general secretary of the Communist Party of China Central Committee and chairman of the Central Military Commission, instructed Party committees and governments at all levels to put production safety high on the agenda and promote safe development. Pursuing development regardless of safety or considering safety insignificant are not allowed, he said, adding that formalism and bureaucratism should be avoided.

Considering the characteristics and problems of production-related accidents, targeted efforts should be made to strengthen risk control and fundamentally remove hidden perils to contain the occurrence of especially serious accidents, Xi said.

China's top leadership considers workplace safety to be of great importance. On Wednesday, a meeting of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee, presided over by Xi, also stressed identifying all kinds of potential safety dangers, improving contingency plans and enhancing rapid response capabilities to protect lives and property.

At the same teleconference, Premier Li Keqiang also issued written instructions, urging a three-year rectification mission to address safety problems in key fields including hazardous chemicals, mines, transportation, industrial parks, urban construction and hazardous wastes. Efforts are needed to improve the responsibility system for workplace safety and management as well as the system for identifying hidden dangers and preventing risks, Li said.