[China] National People’s Congress Tackling rural poverty, wealth divide

from Monday Morning Lebanon

China’s 745 million people in the countryside, who have seen the benefits of the past 25 years of economic reforms largely flow to the cities, resulting in rising rural unrest, were of particular focus in Wen’s speech.

“We need to continue to... pay closer attention to balancing development between urban and rural areas and among regions,” Wen said, as he announced a raft of measures to develop a new “socialist countryside”.

To this end, Wen said the government would boost spending on its impoverished countryside by 14.2 percent this year to 42 billion dollars.
“We need to standardize the way income is distributed and increase the income of people in the lower and middle income brackets”, Wen indicated.

In his two-hour speech to the 2,927 delegates to the National People’s Congress, Wen said China’s economy was expected to slow to around eight percent this year following an expansion of 9.9 percent in 2005.
Between 2006 and 2010, Wen said the government had set a target of 7.5 percent average annual growth.

China posted growth of 9.9 percent in 2005, maintaining its status as the world’s fastest growing major economy, but the apparent success disguised major problems that, if left unattended, could cause society to implode.

The government is under mounting pressure to bring about economic growth to absorb labor, many of them laid off from inefficient state enterprises, and Wen said it hoped to this year create nine million more jobs.

Wen also focused on the need to lower the reliance on government-funded investment for economic growth and promote consumer spending.
Hundreds of millions of Chinese are reluctant spenders because they worry about the future in a society where cradle-to-grave welfare is now a thing of the past.
“We will address people’s concerns that increasing consumption will make them unable later to meet basic living needs”, Wen pledged.

The government would do this by accelerating efforts to make access to education, medical care and housing easier for more people, he said.
Even while encouraging more consumer spending, the government would try to keep consumer price inflation below three percent this year.

While Wen and his colleagues hope to see more Chinese hit the shopping malls and restaurants, they would like less frantic activity on construction sites, especially for projects not needed.

“We must resolutely put a stop to the building of ‘image projects’ and ‘vanity projects’ and combat unplanned and redundant development,” the Finance Ministry said in its budget report.

Wen also said the government would make greater efforts to boost consumer spending by providing a stronger social safety net.
Among the other major spending announcements, the Finance Ministry confirmed in budget papers released to the press that the country’s military spending would rise by 14.7 percent to 35 billion dollars this year.

While most of Wen’s speech focused on economic and social issues, the strongest round of applause from the delegates came when he delivered a stern warning to Taiwan about any independence ambitions.

“We will uncompromisingly oppose secessionist activities aimed at Taiwanese independence”, he said, following a renewed spike in cross-strait tensions last week.
Outside the Great Hall of the People, the authorities continued to round up protesters and silence activists.

Although the Congress is the world’s largest parliament, it is regarded as a rubber-stamp body for the country’s Communist Party rulers who have led China since 1949.

The “terrifying” wealth gap is the main reason behind the country’s rising social unrest, according to a senior trade union official.
“China is becoming a region where wealth is being accumulated by a small number of people faster than most any other place in the world”, said Li Yonghai, a secretary with the All China Federation of Trade Unions.

“The wealth gap between rich and poor is terrifying and is the basic source of social instability”, the China Youth Daily quoted him as saying.
Li, speaking on the sidelines of the ongoing NPC, said there were 236,000 US dollar millionaires in China in 2003 with an accumulated wealth of 969 billion dollars.
This compared with China’s gross domestic product (GDP) for that year of 1.4 trillion dollars.

Li said that after 25 years of robust economic growth, the benefits of China’s capitalist reforms had not trickled down to the lowest levels of society, particularly in poor rural areas.
“If we want to resolve this issue then we have to adjust the overall income distribution system”, Li said.

He proposed government spending on social security should rise from the current three percent of GDP to between four and five percent during the 2006-2010 period.
By comparison, the United States spends 5.4 percent of its GDP on such undertakings, he recalled.

President Hu Jintao attended Sunday’s opening, along with seven of the other eight members of the Politburo.

Medical care, environment

The country’s arrangements for medical care are a particular cause for concern, as illustrated by the case of Lian Guangzhan, 73, a farmer in Hefei.
Sharp stomach aches made eating and drinking painful for him, but he silently endured the pain for months, dreading an enormous hospital bill.

When he could no longer take in any food or liquid, losing a lot of weight, his children bundled him up, put him in a minivan before dawn and drove four hours to the biggest hospital in his home province, Anhui.

“I didn’t want to be a burden on my children, but they didn’t want me to just wait to die”, said Lian, sitting on a gurney in Anhui Provincial Hospital, wiping teary eyes.
He might have waited too long but he’s still one of the luckier ones. Many farmers and poor city dwellers do just that -- wait to die.

Two decades after China scrapped free health care to ease the government’s burden, many people have no choice but to delay or avoid seeing a doctor because they can’t afford it.

Elderly people, in particular, would rather die if they suffer a serious illness instead of using up their family’s hard earned savings or force the family into debt.
The state of China’s health care system has belatedly become a major concern for the leaders and lawmakers assembled in the Great Hall of the People.

“We will give a high priority to medical and health care work”, Premier Wen said in his opening comments to the congress as he unveiled a multi-billion yuan spending package for hospitals and health insurance.

China’s attempts at medical care reforms will be closely watched by the international community, especially amid concern over the ability of the country to identify and treat bird flu.

China has reported nine human deaths from the bird flu, although there are worries the problem is bigger than official statistics show with other people falling victim without seeking treatment.

The largely rural Anhui province in East China reflects the sad state of the country’s medical care system.
In the Anhui hospital’s emergency room, one woman said her father refused any treatment for liver cancer because he knew his children, almost all of whom were unemployed, lacked the money.

“He died in a lot of pain”, said the woman who declined to give her name as many Chinese are afraid to do when they are speaking about problems in China. “It was very hard for us to watch him suffer”.

One woman waiting for an appointment with her elderly mother said: “Once your money runs out, they stop treatment right away”.
Local farmers told of sick elderly people in villages who were bedridden but lacked money for treatment.

Health Ministry statistics show that 33 percent of rural patients do not see doctors when they are ill and 45 percent of rural inpatients leave hospitals before they are cured.

Nearly 80 percent of rural inhabitants and 50 percent of the urban population lack medical insurance.
Health care services in rural areas are severely underfunded, with many hospitals in the countryside lacking basic equipment such as oxygen tanks. Intensive care units are even more rare.

One township hospital in Anhui had a rusted metal gurney as the only operation table and the most rudimentary of equipment.
“We don’t perform upper body surgeries because we don’t have the expertise or equipment”, said Li Tianwei, director of the Fengjing Township Hospital.

The hospital’s stairs were caked with dry mud and the bathroom was a squat toilet covered with feces.
Such conditions force people such as Lian to travel hundreds of kilometers to see a decent doctor.

Lian first went to a county hospital, which charged him 13,000 yuan for minimal care.
“Doctors did little more than set him up on an IV drip, check his temperature twice a day and give him some basic medicine”, said Lian’s daughter, who declined to be named.

To pay the bill, his six children pitched in 2,000 yuan each -- a sizable sum as they earned only 6,000 yuan a year.
As they waited anxiously for Lian to be seen by a doctor at the provincial hospital, they worried about an even bigger bill.

“We’ll just have to come up with the money somehow”, said Lian’s daughter.
Another area of growing concern is the worsening state of the environment. Wen urged measures to “basically halt” the destruction of the environment in the name of economic growth.

Wen was introducing lawmakers to energy-saving policies and other efforts planned for the next five years.
“Conscientiously fulfilling these tasks and measures will significantly increase the efficiency of resource consumption and basically halt the ecological and environmental deterioration”.

Wen’s annual work report, delivered at the start of the 10-day meeting of the National People’s Congress, contained more references to China’s dire environmental situation than in previous years.

“We must work ceaselessly if we are to create clean and pleasant living and working conditions for the people and leave our future generations with blue skies, green land, clear water and verdant mountains”.

The 11th five-year plan, which lasts from this year until late 2010, sets rough numerical targets for a reduction of pollution, calling for a 10-percent reduction in the total discharge of major pollutants by the end of the decade.
“We will strengthen law enforcement and improve inspections to monitor environmental and ecological protection”.

Industrial pollution of China’s waterways drew the global spotlight last November when a chemical factory explosion in Jilin Province in the Northeast released 100 tons of toxic benzene and nitrobenzene into the Songhua River, forcing officials to cut off the water supply to millions of people downstream.

It was one of China’s biggest environmental scares and raised major concerns in neighboring Russia as the slick also threatened to affect people on that side of the border.

Facts about the National People’s Congress
Chairman: Wu Bangguo, formally the second-most important person in China’s political system after President Hu Jintao.
Venue: The Great Hall of the People, a neo-classical concrete structure immediately to the west of Tiananmen Square.
Duration: Ten days.
Delegates: 2,927 people who are selected from people’s congresses at the provincial level and from among the ranks of the armed forces. The Standing Committee of the NPC is a smaller elite of about 160.
Frequency of meetings: Once a year, usually in early March. To handle legislative matters in between, the Standing Committee of the NPC meets roughly every two months throughout the year.
Legislative Powers: The congress is often criticized as a mere rubber-stamp body for the nation’s Communist Party rulers and laws are always passed with overwhelming majorities. But some observers say dissenting voices do get heard in the law-preparation stage behind closed doors.
Budgetary Powers: The NPC votes on, and always passes with big majorities, the annual budget of the government.
Appointment Powers: Ranking officials from the president to the ministers and the senior judges are officially elected by the NPC.
Supervisory Powers: Formally, the NPC is entitled to supervise all other branches of government, but even Chinese constitutional scholars agree it is not doing a very good job.
Issues: NPC sessions tend to provide clues about what the leadership considers important. Premier Wen Jiabao highlighted in his opening speech that top issues this year include the plight of the rural poor and addressing other imbalances in the economy.
History: The first NPC gathered in 1954. Its longest hiatus was for nearly a decade after the start of the Cultural Revolution in 1966, when it became a non-entity not even mentioned in school textbooks.