BEIJING — Communist leaders have launched China's most ambitious initiative in decades, promising billions of dollars in social spending and farm aid to help the 800 million people in its neglected countryside catch up with its booming cities.

The blueprint unveiled at this week's parliament meeting echoes President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal of the 1930s, and is aimed at easing tensions over the growing gap between China's rich and poor.

But Beijing faces challenges making it work in the countryside, where their control over local leaders is limited, abuses are common, and anger at corruption and land seizures is rising.

"The countryside is very much like a lawless place," said Ding Xueliang, a former Communist Party official who teaches at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.

The plan for a "new socialist countryside" promises new schools, hospitals, roads and other aid to the countryside, where many people are as poor as ever while a small elite have prospered from two decades of economic reform.

The programs are the starting point of what the ruling party has said will be an effort lasting at least a decade to shift development resources to the countryside.

"China is now standing at a new historical starting point," Premier Wen Jiabao said Sunday in a speech to parliament delegates, who routinely approve policies decided in advance by communist leaders.

Ding said current leaders are better aware of what is going on than previous generations.

President Hu Jintao and Wen, spent many years in Tibet and other impoverished regions, and they have extensive contacts outside Beijing.

"They know much more about the realities in the terribly poor regions," Ding said.

Thanks to annual economic growth above 9 percent and surging tax revenues, the government can afford to invest in the countryside, where incomes average only $400 a year.

China's consumer spending boom is largely limited to the cities. Rural families save whatever little they have for education and doctor bills.

The government is raising spending on subsidies and other support for farmers by 11 percent to $42 billion this year.

It is eliminating farm taxes and waiving school fees for rural families, with $27 billion in increased support for compulsory education, through grade nine, over the next five years.

Some $2.5 billion in new spending is earmarked for upgrading and building hospitals by 2010. An additional $500 million will be spent on increasing government support for rural health insurance programs.