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China: The battle against social
inequality
By Antoaneta Bezlova
BEIJING - Chinese leaders' new rallying cry to
build xiaokang or a well-off life, which emerged
from their crucial 16th Communist Party Congress in
November, underscores their increasing anxiety over
social inequality in the country.
Confucian in
origin, the 3,000-year-old term refers to a condition of
moderate prosperity, and its fleshing out as the new
party slogan is meant to appease the grievances of
millions of Chinese peasants and workers who have been
left by the wayside by more than 20 years of wrenching
market reforms.
As the Chinese communist
leadership is still loath to admit that its ultimate
goal is to create a middle class, party theoreticians
have opted for a term with rich historical overtones
that would appeal both to China's nascent well-off
groups and placate the disgruntled social classes.
In the wake of the congress, a deluge of media
reports about xiaokang have said that all of
China - from its poor rural areas to its more affluent
cities - will reach this level of "moderate well-off
life" by 2020.
This is a revision of late
paramount leader Deng Xiaoping's stated goal in 1979 of
reaching a well-off society by the end of the 20th
century. At the time, Deng also warned that in the rush
toward modernization some people would "get rich first"
while the majority of the country's 1.3 billion
population would get rich later.
"The new line
indicates China's leadership will pay more attention to
overall social progress in addition to economic growth,"
said Lu Xueyi, sociologist at the Institute of Sociology
at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.
In
his speech at the party congress, outgoing party chief
Jiang Zemin admitted that the well-off life that Chinese
people were living was "at a low level", is "not
all-inclusive" and "very uneven". He pledged to
quadruple the country's per capita gross domestic
product (GDP) in 2000 by 2020, meaning it will exceed
US$3,000.
But the real challenge, China watchers
warn, does not lie in achieving the higher level of GDP
if the momentum of current rapid economic growth is
sustained. The real challenge China faces in pursuit of
an overall xiaokang society is how to achieve
fair distribution of social wealth because
xiaokang denotes not only material comfort, but
also social equality.
"Economic development has
been the top priority in the past two decades. Social
justice is equally important," wrote a team of
academics, including political scientists and
economists, in one of China's most influential
think-tank publications, the Strategy and Management
journal, in May.
In an era of aggressive
privatization of state assets, the gap between rich and
poor in China's previously egalitarian society has
quickly widened. Roughly 70 percent of China's people
are peasants who earn about $100 a year, while a great
chunk of the country's wealth is concentrated in just
several hundred families.
Between 1995 and 200,
state-owned firms and work units laid off some 48
million workers, according to the Strategy and
Management article. "Economic development, especially in
the past six or seven years, has become a zero-sum
game," the authors wrote. "While a minority got rich
rapidly, some social groups became losers for the first
time."
The article also warned of an impending
social crisis: "The situation that worries us most is
that even the highest leadership denies the nation is
polarized between rich and poor. If it goes on, the
nation will have to pay a big social and political
price."
Judging by the pronouncements at the
16th Party Congress, where a new leadership with Vice
President Hu Jintao as elected as party chief, Beijing
is coming to grasp the magnitude of social risks hidden
beneath the country's growing wealth gap.
The
call to build a xiaokang society has been termed
in the state media as a blueprint for China's future
development and members of the Communist Party all over
the country must formally study its ideas.
A
high-profile economic conference, which ended in Beijing
on the weekend, also declared that the key priorities of
government work for next year would be how to improve
the welfare of rural people, laid-off workers and
impoverished households.
"The nation has begun
waking up to the growing gap wealth between the rich and
poor," said in a front-page story in the
English-language newspaper China Daily on the weekend.
In its push to create a well-off life for the
Chinese, the country's leaders are also concerned about
creating a middle-income group capable of buying Chinese
products and sustaining the momentum of economic growth.
In the past decade, China has attracted some
$800 billion in foreign investment - a formidable
propellant for transforming the country's once stagnant
economy into a regional economic powerhouse.
But
to sustain China's annual economic growth of 8 percent
in the future, Beijing needs to reduce the country's
dependence on overseas capital and to create a sizable
group of middle-income earners who have considerable
purchasing power.
"The importance of foreign
capital in China's economic rise has often been
overlooked," said Richard Baum, professor of political
science at the University of California in Los Angeles.
"Chinese leaders, however, are well aware that they need
an alternative source of economic growth should one day
the flow of foreign money into China dry up."
(Inter Press Service)
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