Vice-Premier Hui Liangyu yesterday called on Southwest China's Chongqing municipality to make greater efforts to become a leading economic force in the country's underdeveloped western region.

Hui attended a meeting marking the 10th anniversary of the setting up of the Chongqing municipality. In March 1997, the city was approved as China's fourth centrally-administered municipality after Beijing, Shanghai and Tianjin.

Hui extended his congratulations on behalf of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China and the State Council.

He said Chongqing must aim to become "an economic development engine in the country's western region, an economic center in the upper reaches of the Yangtze River, and a municipality with coordinated development between urban and rural areas".

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Hui said he hoped Chongqing could develop a "new" way of development, namely, using big cities to lead the development of rural areas.

Compared with the country's affluent eastern coastal areas, the central and western regions have been left behind in economic development.

On June 7, Chongqing and Chengdu, capital of neighboring Sichuan Province, were selected by the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), as pilot cities for coordinated and balanced development between urban and rural areas.

Covering 82,000 sq km, Chongqing municipality has a population of 31 million, 73 percent of whom live in rural areas.

The city's gross domestic product was 348.6 billion yuan ($45.8 billion) in 2006. However, its growth has been grossly uneven.

The per capita GDP in Wuxi County was 3,593 yuan last year, only one-tenth of that in the developed Yuzhong District.

Acknowledging the municipality's economic, political and cultural development in the past 10 years, Hui also urged Chongqing to improve its overall capacity and to change its pattern of economic growth.