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A vendor watches the live telecast of the annual government work report by outgoing Premier Wen Jiabao on a television in a vegetable market in Fuyang in central China's Anhui province on Tuesday.

BEIJING — China pledged to tackle problems which threaten to alienate the country's growing middle class and aspirational masses as its once-in-a-decade changing of the guard at the top of the country’s government got under way.

"We should unwaveringly combat corruption, strengthen political integrity, establish institutions to end the excessive concentration of power and lack of checks on power and ensure that officials are honest, government is clean and political affairs are handled with integrity,"said China's outgoing premier Wen Jiabao at the China’s National People’s Congress (NPC).

Wen on Tuesday enumerated major domestic challenges that have caused public discontent in recent years — air pollution, toxic factories, tainted food and abuses of power — and pledged more resources to environmental protection and public welfare. His speech was a tacit admission that quality of life had been sidelined by a focus on breakneck economic growth.

"We are keenly aware we still face many difficulties and problems in our economic and social development," said the premier, whose family was accused in a New York Times report late last year of amassing billions of dollars in assets. 

While the Chinese leadership also announced a boost in defense spending, the focus of this year’s Congress appeared to be decidedly domestic.

Widening inequality and a more discontented middle class were the big issues facing new leaders, said Damien Ma, analyst at the Paulson Institute, an independent think-tank.

"The problem is whether China can address the costs of that growth and seriously face the growing social cleavages that such growth has wrought," he said.  

The rhetoric about improving the quality of life was not new, said Susan Shirk, an expert on Chinese politics and former Deputy Assistant Secretary of State during the Clinton administration.

Reuters, file

An elderly exercises in the morning as he faces chimneys emitting smoke behind buildings across the Songhua river in Jilin, Jilin province, on Feb. 24. China's new rulers will focus on consumer-led growth to narrow the gap between rich and poor while taking steps to curb pollution and graft, the government has said.

"The ... government talked about it every year at the NPC for the past 10 years," she said.

It was also unclear how far the government could go to address worries over extraordinary high levels of pollution and food safety, experts said.

A boost in budget for forces tasked with maintaining the peace at home was worth note, said Jeffrey Wasserstrom, author of "China in the 21st Century."

China's public security budget will reach $32.6 billion, an increase of 7.9 percent, which will "improve the mechanism for ensuring funding for primary-level ... judicial and public security departments," according to a Ministry of Finance report.

A big challenge for the government, and a possible impediment to addressing environmental concerns, will be the need to maintain high rates of economic growth, according to experts. 

"The government will struggle to reconcile its environmental agenda with the resource-intensive urbanization program that is set to underpin economic growth," said Nicholas Consonery of political-risk consulting firm Eurasia.

To boost domestic consumption and mitigate the widening rich-poor divide, China plans to migrate hundreds of millions of farmers to the cities in the next ten years. With higher incomes, the urban middle class will boost domestic consumption which will underpin future economic growth. 

In addition to promising to grapple with environmental and social welfare issues, the government announced a 10.7 percent increase to its military budget, continuing the double digit increases seen in the last two decades, even as the country appeared set to see its lowest economic growth in years. 

A new aircraft carrier and stealth fighter bombers would be added to the military amid escalating maritime disputes with Japan and other Asian neighbors, the NPC announced.

The defense modernization will help to ”resolutely uphold China’s sovereignty, security and territorial integrity,” Wen said during his last work report after ten years at the helm of China’s Cabinet.

The move is seen as attempt of the new leadership headed by Party chief and incoming President Xi Jinping to project strength and forge strong ties with China’s military, a major base of support. China is now the world’s second biggest military spender with $114 billion, after the United States which spent $633 billion last year.

The ongoing military buildup was not cause for alarm, Shirk said.

“The increase is consistent with past budgets... Roughly in line with economic growth. Not a massive military buildup,” she said.

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Chinese soldiers march past the Great Hall of the People after a pre-opening session of the National People's Congress, China's parliament, on March 4, 2013 in Beijing, China.

BEIJING — The call came late on Monday night.

"More than 70 police raided our (guest house)," said former policeman He Zuhua. "Police are everywhere."

His voice shook and he soon hung up, fearing that authorities would trace the call to the public telephone on the capital’s ragged outskirts. NBC News has been unable to reach him since.

He says he and a handful of former police officers are being pursued and detained by authorities after traveling to the capital to help shine a light on corruption within their ranks. The officers have joined droves of unhappy citizens who annually converge on Beijing in the hopes of petitioning their leaders for help during the annual National People's Congress which started Monday. Each spring scores of petitioners are pulled from buses, trains, sidewalks, and simple hotels and locked up in secret locations, known as "black jails."

The police stand out because all were once part of the justice system they seek to reform. According to two members of the group of 14 hoping to press for change, all of them are former police officers claiming to be themselves victims of pervasive corruption. 

Their plight underscores how hard it is to combat patronage and graft in China, and how easy it was for insiders to fall from grace, said Hu Xingdou, a professor at Beijing Institute of Technology.

"In a country that lacks legal protection, it is not safe for anyone," he said. "In China the judiciary, which is the base of anti-corruption, is not just."

"Anyone can fall into a disadvantaged group from an advantaged group," he added.

The crackdown on police petitioners came after China’s new leader Xi Jinping declared war on corruption, staking his name to promises that he would root out graft that infests everything from kindergarten admissions to the highest levels of government. He has called for anti-corruption campaigns ranging from banning luxury banquets to prohibiting floral displays and red carpet treatment for the official delegations.

According to He, he and the other former police officers from around the country were first rounded up on Feb. 24 as they ate together in a restaurant in Beijing. After 24 hours, three of the petitioners were taken from the detention facility with officials from their home provinces, He said. The rest "escaped," he said.

"Corruption in the judicial system is the cause of all corruption," he said before the Feb. 24 incident. "If we cannot change this, then China will collapse."

Police officials contacted by NBC News denied any knowledge of a raid involving former officers.

He says he had worked in a county investigation unit in China’s central Henan province until 2002 when he refused to give false evidence in a trial involving local officials. He was sentenced to a year in prison on charges of corruption, He says.

Senior officials in Henan told him that his case lacked the proper evidence and promised a new investigation, He says. A decade after He lost his job and nothing had been done about the case.

Both of the police officers NBC News interviewed said they had traveled to Beijing to protest corruption within the judicial system, and hoped to present an open letter asking the delegates of the NPC to address the issue.

The NPC, made up of nearly 3,000 candidates is vested with lawmaking powers. In reality, it has acted mainly as a rubber stamp for the ruling Communist Party decisions. Over time, however, votes on measures or candidates nominated by the party have stopped being unanimous, signaling growing diversity if not the emergence of an opposition. Petitioners come from all over the country seeking redress for wrongs.

Tian Lan says she was once an award-winning senior police officer. After exposing a corruption scandal among local police in Northern Hebei province in 2002, Tian says she was jailed and tortured for a year. A Guangping court in Hebei charged Tian with six crimes including passing on states secrets, but the court failed to present evidence.

Since then Tian says she has been a petitioner. She says that to prevent her from petitioning, the local government has refused to renew her national identity card, which she needs to apply for a new job. Sometimes Tian has had to beg for food, she says.

"If people like me, who are inside the system, are mistreated like this, can you imagine how average citizens are treated?" Tian asked in tears.

Tian and He are not unique.

In the vast central city of Chonqqing, over 1,000 policemen, were recently given back their jobs as redress for mistreatment suffered at the hands of notoriously heavy-handed deposed police chief Wang Lijun. Wang has since been charged with crimes of abuse power for his role in a scandal that brought down charismatic Chongqing party boss Bo Xilai.

Before their arrest Tian and He told NBC they knew they might be detained before their demonstration.

"We are not here out of personal interest, but to fight against this nation’s corruption," said He. "This country must change."

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