President Xi Jinping has called for fresh business creation efforts to revive China's flagging northeastern region, once a major heavy industrial hub, while highlighting the importance of State-owned enterprises in the country's development.

Xi made his remarks during an inspection tour of Jilin province from Thursday to Saturday, urging the region to strive for breakthroughs while adapting to slower economic development.

"More efforts should be made to push forward the innovation drive ... to boost the vigor of the whole of society in innovation and business startups," Xi said.

Noting that SOEs are an important force in advancing modernization and safeguarding people's common interests, Xi also urged continual efforts to ensure such companies become stronger and more competitive.

He stressed the important role of innovation, quality and management in the development of SOEs, saying their reform should preserve or increase the value of state-owned capital and improve the economy's competitiveness.

He urged vigorous promotion of the enthusiasm of model workers, safeguarding the legitimate rights of workers and building harmonious labor relations.

At a company in Yanbian that is a subsidiary of the pharmaceutical giant Jilin Aodong, Xi inspected products and manufacturing lines, urging employees to closely track progress in the biopharmaceutical field and intensify research to develop more high-tech products.

Workers must ensure that every type of medicine and each tablet is safe and reliable, he said.

While visiting the Changchun Railway Vehicles Co, Xi praised a system in which every worker is required to register during key manufacturing processes, so that defects can be tracked.

Describing the high-speed locomotives as a much sought-after commodity in the country's economic and technological cooperation overseas, Xi urged the industry to seize opportunities to invest more in research and development and build the country into a modern equipment manufacturing power.

He stressed the importance of a pilot zone in Jilin that aims to advance cross-border cooperation in the Tumen River Delta, which straddles the borders of China, Russia and North Korea.

The Changchun-Jilin-Tumen Development Pilot Zone, founded in 2009, should be built into an example of successful opening of border areas and international cooperation in Northeast Asia, Xi said.

He urged the pilot zone's authorities to plan its development carefully, deploy its resources efficiently and build it into an example in the northeast.

During his inspection tour, Xi visited Yanbian, home to China's largest Korean ethnic minority population. The area is also important for economic restructuring in the northeast, which used to be a major heavy industrial hub, but has suffered economic setbacks for years, he said.

While visiting farmers, Xi stressed the importance of food safety to the country, offering more support to farming areas so that the local economy will improve and farmers can increase their income. He also instructed villages and local governments to preserve the traditions of the Korean ethnic group when planning the development of rural communities.

(China Daily 07/20/2015 page1)