DEVELOPMENT: Great Leap to Help Rural China

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Antoaneta Bezlova

BEIJING, Oct 7 2005 (IPS) - The Chinese Communist Party has a new buzzword- creation of a ”harmonious society”. Behind this lofty ideal lies a sea of anxiety that uneven distribution of wealth between urban and rural China might spell the end of the party’s half-a-century rule.

At a party plenum that begins on Oct. 8, Chinese Communist rulers would approve a draft of a new policy blueprint promoting the development of a ”harmonious society” to counter the risks to their monopoly on power that currently exists.

Social justice, rather than political liberalisation, is the driving force behind the blueprint as the government’s bottomline remains the preservation of the Communist Party’s dominance.

The 11th Five-Year Plan, or the ”five-year blueprint” as it is termed, emphasises China’s evolution towards market economy and also aims to complete the Chinese leadership’s shift over the last three years from a development model that blindly pursues GDP growth towards more ”scientific concept of development”.

The latter catchphrase means that the central leadership wants economic growth to be sustainable in the long term, and more balanced than it has been in the past. The emphasis on people-centric, rather than output- oriented development, has been the focus of President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao since they took over the party in 2002 and the state government in 2003.

”In the next five years, China should pay more attention to social fairness and democracy and earnestly solve the problems closely related to the people’s interests,” said a statement published by the state-run Xinhua News Agency.

”Development of economy and society, of cities and the countryside, and of different regions, should be more balanced and harmonious in the 2006- 2010 period”.

A few years ago, the most high-profile theme of central policy was greater official endorsement of the private sector. This was marked by the policies and theories of the former state president and Communist party general secretary Jiang Zemin.

The private sector continues to be important to the central leadership but Jiang’s successor, Hu Jintao, appears increasingly intent on addressing the state’s responsibilities to those so far excluded from the country’s economic boom.

The official plenum notice states that China faces a ”crucial period in the next five years”, a time when ”the whole country should intensify an awareness of our problems, to think about our dangers”, according to the Xinhua News Agency.

The past two months have seen a spate of reports showing that the Communist Party is becoming ever more concerned about social tensions between the rich and poor.

Top government advisers, scholars and even the state-controlled media have expressed in no uncertain terms their concerns about the social costs of China’s rapid economic growth and of its transition to a market economy.

An official report commissioned by the ministry of labour and social security said the country was now in a “yellow-light” zone, the second most serious indicator of ”social instability”, because of its widening income gap and warned that ”we are going to hit the red-light scenario after 2010 if there are no effective solutions in the next few years”.

The report published in Study Times, a publication run by the Communist Party Central Party School, said the widening income gap may give rise to various sorts of social instability. ”Decision makers should not turn a blind eye to the big income gap,” the newspaper warned.

The public security ministry recently admitted that there were 74,000 serious protests last year, involving more than 3.7 million people, up from10,000 in 1994 and 58,000 in 2003.

China’s most senior police official, Zhou Yongkang, announced the setting up of special riot squad units tasked with responding rapidly to mass local protests that officials deem may turn ”highly confrontational”. Last week, state media said that so far this year, violent clashes and riots have claimed the lives of 23 policemen, while some 1,826 policemen had been injured.

President Hu came to power in 2002 promising to create an ”all-around well-off society” and to redress the inequities between China’s prosperous coastal and urbanised regions and its poorer inland and rural regions, where the majority of China’s 1.3 billion people live.

He vowed to pay greater attention to the plight of those who have fallen behind during the years of economic reform. These include rural dwellers, whose income growth has lagged behind that of urban employees, as well as former workers at state-owned enterprises, who lost their job security and benefits.

There has been some success in alleviating such problems. The last two budgets have increased spending on rural education and health care and reduced the tax burden on peasants. Farming incomes have risen slowly and China is mulling a raise in the amount of non-taxable income, and enforcing tougher laws on those evading taxes.

However, the numerous reports of violent clashes between peasants and officials over land ownership, polluting factories, and a series of health scares with dangerous new strains of avian and porcine viruses, both of which carry the threat of massive epidemics, have shown that far too little has been done in practice.

Another recent report affirmed publicly what has long been the charge of independent experts: the vast majority of health spending is devoted to a minority in urban China.

Almost nothing is spent on rural health by the state so peasants have to fend for themselves, said a report issued in August by the Development Research Centre, one of the top government advisory bodies.

The government share of national health spending had plummeted from close to 100 percent, during the planned economy period, to about 16 percent today as the central government gradually withdrew from providing health services, the report found.

The inadequacies of the public health system have shown up repeatedly by the AIDS crisis in rural China, the SARS epidemic and now the recent plagues involving poultry and pigs.

Urban dwellers have benefited at the expense of their rural countrymen in education too. A lot of money has been used to build modern colleges and universities in the cities, but the money allocated for compulsory education in rural areas only accounts for seven percent of the educational budget.

”It will be very difficult for China to maintain a rapid growth if the problems concerning peasants and the countryside are not solved,” reckons Wen Tiejun, researcher with the School of Agriculture and Rural Development at Renmin University.