HONG KONG - China's Communist Party (CCP)
wrapped up a four-day closed-door meeting on
Tuesday that was convened to agree on a new
roadmap that will reduce emphasis on the policy of
faster economic growth in favor of improving
social services and curbing environmental
devastation.
The plenary session of the
354-member Central Committee had been expected to
hammer out the 11th Five-Year Plan (2006 to 2010)
that will stress a more sustainable model for the
country's growth to address social problems and
the gap between rich and poor.
The leaders
in Beijing see the next five years as critical as
the rocketing economy may slow down. The economy
grew 9.4% in
the
first nine months of this year, compared to the
same period a year ago, and is forecast to expand
9.2% for the entire year, the country's top
planning agency, the National Development and
Reform Commission, has reported.
The
plenum was also heavy with political importance as
candidates who could succeed CCP Secretary General
Hu Jintao in 2012 were also expected to emerge
during the occasion. The plenum was thus a test
for Hu after replacing Jiang Zemin as party chief
in 2002, state president in 2003 and military
chief last year.
Some observers believe
that Hu will promote some of his political allies
to become politburo members or alternate members.
Likely candidates are Liaoning CCP Secretary Li
Keqiang, Shaanxi Deputy CCP Secretary Yuan
Chunqing, Qinghai Governor Song Xiuyan, and
Jiangsu CCP Secretary Li Yuanchao.
These
rising stars of the CCP were all born after 1949
when the party took over mainland China. They all
became vice-minister-level officials when they
were in their early 40s, which means they have
been promoted faster than normal.
Any one
of them could be in line for Hu's job as CCP
secretary general in 2012, so Hu will be watching
- and protecting them - carefully as he
consolidates his political influence. All four of
these officials have worked with the Chinese Youth
League, which is an important power base of Hu.
Economics is uppermost in the minds of
many, though, as they foresee something of a soft
landing ahead, even though in the past 25 years
China has maintained 9.5% annual growth, far
beyond the world average of 3.7%.
At
present, foreign trade accounts for up to 70% of
the national economy, which experts say is an
over-reliance in comparison to the less than 20%
of such countries as the US, Japan, India and
Germany. Therefore, the government must figure out
an innovative strategy to stimulate domestic
consumption while expanding overseas markets.
The heavy foreign trade share is not only
an economic issue, but also a diplomatic one.
According to a report of the China Economic Times,
China's reliance on the US market rose to 8.95% in
2003, and the increasing interdependence is the
crux of frequent Sino-US trade friction.
Two years ago, Washington began to target
its anti-dumping investigations at televisions,
textiles, furniture and even batteries made in
China. Wall Street also attacks Beijing for
"exporting" deflation, and is still pressing for a
further revaluation of the yuan. All this suggests
an inevitable impact on an excessive dependence on
foreign trade.
To scale down reliance on
foreign trade as a driver of the economy, the
government realizes that it must shift to a
domestic-driven development model, which they want
to carry out step-by-step and from region to
region, considering the huge geographical
development disparity in the country.
The
11th plan is expected to pilot the
domestic-demand-oriented model in the developed
coastal areas; to renew preferential policies for
foreign-related enterprises in mid and west China;
to promote other industries, the services sector
in particular.
Energy strategy will also
be in the limelight. China is a resource-famished
country in per-capita terms. In 2000, the oil
reserve per head was 2.6 tons; gas, 1,074 cubic
meters; coal, 90 tons - all far beneath world
averages. Today, the known oil deposits of 2.3
billion tons will have been exploited in 14 years;
gas, 610 billion cubic meters in 32 years; coal, 9
trillion tons in less than a century. And some 86%
of the unused resources are located in the dry,
desolate land in mid and west China, thus
difficult to tap and deliver.
Meanwhile,
China had become an overall importer of oil and in
2000 it had to buy 31% of its needed oil from
abroad. A conservative estimate is that the
country will devour no less than 450 million tons
of oil in 2020, about 60% of which will need to be
imported.
China's rising reliance on oil
imports not only affects the international oil
market, but also highlights the country's energy
security. How to evaluate international oil
security, how to take full advantage of resources
at home and abroad, how to establish a contingency
and a pre-warning system, how to sharpen the
competitive edge of state-owned oil companies,
these are all pressing questions facing the
Chinese government.
Social concerns Social justice, rather than political
liberalization, is the driving force behind the
five-year blueprint as the government's bottom
line remains the preservation of the CCP's
dominance, writes Antoaneta Bezlova of Inter Press
Service.
The plan will stress a more
"scientific concept of development", writes
Bezlova. This 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 Hu and Premier Wen Jiabo since they
took over.
"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.
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 CCP general secretary,
Jiang Zemin.
The private sector continues
to be important to the central leadership, but Hu
appears increasingly intent on addressing the
state's responsibilities to those so far excluded
from the country's economic boom.
The past
two months have seen a spate of reports showing
that the CCP 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
Labor 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 CCP 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 had claimed the lives of 23 policemen, while
some 1,826 policemen had been injured.
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
urbanized 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 past 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 Center, one of the top government
advisory bodies.
The government share of
national health spending had plummeted from close
to 100%, during the planned economy period, to
about 16% 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 7% of the educational
budget, concludes Bezlova of Inter Press Service.
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