Social inequality on agenda of 18th Party Congress
Last weekend, I was invited
to give a lecture at Brown University on Rhode Island. After
breakfast, I took a walk in the chilly Burnside Park in downtown
Providence.
Occupy Providence is one of
about 1,000 "Occupy" protests across the United Sates and the
world, part of a movement seeking socioeconomic changes, such as
opposing corporate control, poverty and exploitation.
The site has been turned
into a "People's Park." Walking around the park, I saw a library,
media center, a kitchen and a clinic run by enthusiastic volunteers
under different tents. Some protesters were university students.
Some were jobless. Some were veterans of the wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan. Some older people were reading books quietly. They
smiled at me when I walked by.
The fence that encloses the
park was lined with colorful protest signs which read "Hands off
state pensions,""Take your dollars out of the big banks," "Work for
social justice,""Capitalism without character is corruption," "We
are assembling for a redress of grievances"and
"We are the 99 percent."
"We are the 99 percent" is
a reference to the tremendous difference in wealth between the top
1 percent and all the remaining citizens of the US. But the
inequality of incomes in China is no smaller than in the US.
China now has the second
largest economy in the world. But China's Gini coefficient, which
measures inequality, is approaching 0.50, up from around 0.28 in
1978, and among the highest in the world.
According to a 2009 UNDP
report, the ratio of income between the richest 10 percent and the
poorest 10 percent was 6.9 in Germany,15.9 in the United
States.According to Li Shi, a professor at Beijing Normal
University, the income of the top 10 percent of the richest Chinese
in 2007 was 23 times that of the poorest 10 percent, while in 1998,
the top 10 percent were only 7.3 times richer. The per capita
income of urban residents is 3.33 times that of rural dwellers.
People in the coastal areas make twice as much as residents living
in the western provinces.
The fruits of the country's
growth are increasingly concentrated among a small minority of the
population, who are the ruling elite in banks, in business, in
media industry, in universities and in the upper echelons of the
government.
If we follow sentiments on
Weibo, China inequalities are making the country angry. Wealth
concentration seems to be getting out of control. Ideological
extremist groups and hate groups of differenct colors are also
discussing about a kind of Occupy movement in China.
On the eve of the 17th
National Congress of the Communist Party of China in 2007, US
scholar Susan Shirk published a book China: Fragile Superpower, in
which she wrote, "The more developed and prosperous the country
becomes, the more insecure and threatened they feel."
Today, the Party is
preparing its 18th National Congress next year. It seems that the
CPC is more upset than ever by the dichotomy between rich and poor,
which poses a serious threat to its
legitimacy.
In 1949, the Party gained
legitimacy through setting a development goal of making people
wealthy and the nation strong. Mao Zedong stressed high
accumulation, low consumption, and giving priority to heavy
industry, resulting in increasing disparities between urban and
rural areas.
Deng Xiaoping introduced market mechanisms by breaking up the
state monopoly, allowing private sector of the economy. Since 1978,
Chinese people have experienced a change of upward social mobility
in which almost everyone became better off. But Deng emphasized
speed of development, advocating some regions and some people
getting rich first and concentrating on the development of coastal
regions, resulting in polarization of wealth and greater regional
disparities.
It has been acknowledged
worldwide that China has been transformed from a planned economy to
a market economy, from a rural society to a metropolitan society,
from an extremely low-income level to a middle-income level. But
shifting from being a middle-income country to a high-income one is
the challenge that confronts us now.
Chinese intellectuals and
think tanks are predicting that a new development strategy would
emerge with the coming 18th Party Congress. It is believed that the
18th Party congress will announce a course of action for the next
five years. I hope the country will take a strategy of "People
First" by investing more money in human development, such as
tackling an aging population, public health, rural education,
environmental protection, housing for low-income people.
Like the phrase "We are the
99 percent" which has become a unifying slogan for the Occupy Wall
Street movement, "People first" can become a unifying slogan for
the 18th Party Congress.
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