** Forum Nasional Indonesia PPI India Mailing List ** ** Untuk bergabung dg Milis Nasional kunjungi: ** Situs Milis: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ppiindia/ ** ** Beasiswa dalam negeri dan luar negeri S1 S2 S3 dan post-doctoral scholarship, kunjungi http://informasi-beasiswa.blogspot.com ** Beijing set to provide help for rural poor By Joseph Kahn The New York Times
SUNDAY, MARCH 5, 2006 BEIJING China's new "historic task" is to narrow the politically volatile gap between rich and poor and enliven the economy of the country's vast but still impoverished rural areas, Prime Minister Wen Jiabao said in a national address Sunday. Wen said officials must find a way to ensure that the two-thirds of China's 1.3 billion people who live in rural areas share the prosperity that has flowed mostly to coastal and urban regions. "We need to see clearly that there are many hardships and problems in economic and social life," Wen said in the televised address before the National People's Congress at the start of China's annual legislative session. "Some deeply seated conflicts that have accumulated over a long time have yet to be fundamentally resolved, and new problems have arisen that cannot be ignored," he said. But Wen promised only a modest increase in government spending to address the problems, suggesting that the Communist Party's vigorous propaganda offensive to address rural woes was so far producing an incremental policy response. The divide between urban and rural incomes, one of the largest such disparities in the world, is viewed by the government as a pivotal factor in rising social unrest that has threatened stability in the one-party state. Critics say inequality itself does not provoke unrest and that the government has not done enough to reduce the underlying causes of social discontent, including corruption, land seizures, pollution, and labor abuses. Wen focused a large section of his speech on the recently announced effort to build a "new socialist countryside," in which the central government has pledged to spend more on agricultural and rural infrastructure, crop subsidies and social services for the country's 800 million farmers and rural residents. He said he had earmarked $42.3 billion in such spending this year, an increase of 14.2 percent over 2005. That rate of growth is not particularly high for a country that recorded 9.9 percent economic growth last year and has had ballooning tax revenue. Over all, central and local government revenue rose 19.8 percent in 2005, according to a budget report released at the legislative session. Wen's administration has already eliminated agricultural taxes, some of which date back thousands of years, in a bid to raise rural incomes. He said Sunday that China's less wealthy western regions this year would completely eliminate tuition and fees associated with required schooling through lower middle school, potentially relieving a significant burden for rural families. Although it received only passing attention in Wen's report, China also announced over the weekend that it would increase military spending this year at a higher rate than the increase in rural investment. The official military budget will grow 14.7 percent to $35.3 billion, continuing a long streak of double-digit increases in outlays for its 2.5 million-strong armed forces. Some American and European military experts say China's official military budget understates its actual spending by a factor of two or three, and that China now devotes more resources to its military than any country except the United States. Its military spending has been a sore point in relations with the United States, which has questioned why Beijing needs to invest heavily in new armaments, including sophisticated aircraft and naval vessels from Russia, even though it often claims to have no enemies and constantly pledges to follow a "peaceful development path." Wen said Sunday that the spending would be devoted mainly to raise pay for soldiers and to "strengthen the army's capability to fight a defensive war." Despite recent tensions with Taiwan over what China views as steps toward formal independence by President Chen Shui-bian, Wen did not put much emphasis on Taiwan in his speech and used relatively restrained language in referring to the threat of Taiwanese independence. But Wen recited a long list of problems that have dogged policy makers in recent years, including excessive government-driven investment, excess production, pollution and high energy use. He said the government would try to reduce the rate of economic growth to 8 percent this year. But he announced the same target a year ago, after which the economy expended nearly 10 percent. He said officials must do more to slow the growth of fixed-asset investment, the primary stimulus in the Chinese economy. Wen also highlighted a fresh commitment to environment controls and energy efficiency. He said China must reduce the amount of energy it takes to produce each dollar of output by 4 percent in 2006 and by 20 percent in five years. After five years, he said, China will also reduce the quantity of pollutants released into the air and water by 10 percent, a significant challenge given that the country's nearly 10 percent rate of growth means it is burning ever greater quantities and coal and oil, and sending more toxins and chemical waste into waterways. He made no mention of instituting a new system of assessing the economic cost of environmental degradation, disappointing some Chinese environmental experts, who hoped the country would embrace experimental methods of calculating "green GDP." [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] *************************************************************************** Berdikusi dg Santun & Elegan, dg Semangat Persahabatan. 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