BEIJING, Mar 8 (AP) -- China's capital city saw the gap between urban and rural residents jump sharply in 2005 from the previous year, a top Beijing official said in a report published Wednesday.

Average income per rural resident stood at 7,890 yuan (US$980;€820) last year, up 9.6 percent over the year before, the official Xinhua News Agency cited Qiang Wei, deputy secretary of the Beijing's Communist Party committee, as saying.

Urban residents earned an average of 17,650 yuan (US$2,200;€1,850), up 12.9 percent from 2004, he said.

The resulting gap was almost 9,800 yuan (US$1,200;€1,000) -- the biggest ever, Qiang said.

Like many big Chinese cities, the city of Beijing includes surrounding rural counties. More than 3 million of its residents are farmers living in some 3,900 villages, the report said.

Qiang pledged to boost farmers' incomes by modernizing agriculture, encouraging development of industries in the suburbs and shifting rural residents to non-farm work.

China's leaders have promised to pour billions of yuan (dollars, euros) into rural areas to help counter the politically divisive gap between the rural areas and fast-growing cities.

According to earlier reports in the state media, the most affluent one-fifth of China's population earn 50 percent of total income, with the bottom one-fifth taking home only 4.7 percent.