China MPs approve plan to streamline cabinet

BEIJING (Reuters) - China's parliament on Saturday approved a plan to streamline the cabinet and foster greener and more efficient government which experts have said is unlikely to end turf wars over industry, energy and pollution.

A total of 2,774 members of the National People's Congress voted for the bureaucratic revamp, 117 against and 99 abstained.

The reforms herd together about a dozen agencies, creating "super-ministries" for industry, transport, housing and construction and the environment, and bring food and drug safety back under the Health Ministry after a series of damaging scares.

The package upgrades the environment watchdog to ministry status, giving more prominence to the battle against pollution that has stoked public discontent. But it was not clear what significant extra powers, if any, the new ministry would have.

It shied away from an energy ministry that at one point was on the drawing board for the world's number two oil consumer. Instead it split planning and management, with an Energy Commission to develop national strategy and a new Energy Bureau to administer.

The National Development and Reform Commission, a sprawling industrial policy bureaucracy, would continue dominating big decisions about oil, gas and power.

New super ministries include "industry and information industries" but the powerful Ministry of Railways was not brought into the transport "super ministry."

The real battle could come once central and local governments and state conglomerates contend for control of key levers of power.

(Reporting by Ben Blanchard; Writing by Benjamin Kang Lim; Editing by Nick Macfie)