China: Wen Jiabao Adresses the National People’s Congress
March 18th, 2006 | Posted by in China | Interesting News | Miscellaneous
During his address to the Chinese parliament, Wen Jiabao made a number of interesting statements that might surprise many who are faithfully bullish about China’s current opportunities and her future. The recent article in the Economist, China: Planning the New Socialist Countryside, is a great read for anyone interested in China.
Here are a few clips from the article:
“Speaking on March 5th, Mr Wen was blunt about China’s many difficulties. His list included continuing overheating of investment in factories, machinery and other fixed assets; rising inventories and falling prices; a decline in corporate profits and mounting losses that were creating ‘greater potential financial risks’.
…”However, spending can only be one part of a solution to the complex woes of the rural areas. …The peasants are at a further disadvantage in that they do not have clear legal title to their fields, making them vulnerable to the whims of developers.
“Given that some 200m rural Chinese have little or no work, one way to spread wealth would be to let them to take more productive jobs in urban areas. But China’s leaders, and many town-dwellers, are already anxious about the numbers flowing into the cities. Such fears would increase if the remaining barriers to migration were suddenly removed.”
TAGS: China | Outsourcing | Economy | MBA
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Mr Wen has every right to be concerned. Since the Communist Revolution, the Politburo’s policies surrounding agriculture have seen one third of the farmland that was there in 1949 now being unusable. A sensible practice may be to use taxes levied in the urban areas and applying them in rural ones, as the gap between rich (largely urban) and poor (largely rural) is wider now than at any point in China’s history. The last time the gap became too wide, there was a revolution. The Communist Party is perhaps fortunate that the people have come to tolerate the status quo for a tad longer than last time.
As much as I would love to see the poor (the world’s poor) rise up and wrest equality from the wealthy and powerful few, the pacifist in me becomes increasingly sad at the possibility of so much death and bloodshed. It is a shame that most people (I hope to be proven embarrassingly wrong about this assumption) lack the foresight, compassion and commitment to the greater good to prevent such painful corrections of social injustice.
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/asia/article352535.ece
I’m not easily disturbed.