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September 23, 2005

China moves to improve the society

"Stability"is always the major concern of Chinese government when facing all kinds of diffucult situations and decisions must be made promptly and effectively. It is indeed very important for the society to keep stable in order to continue its development and improvent of people's living standard . However, after the open and reform policies first advocated by Deng Xiaoping more 20 years ago and being treated as the general direction of the policies since first advocated, the society is moving into a new status that require some altered method to continue, otherwise the situation may turn severe.

What the governments in China feel extremly hard to deal with is that Chinese society has been cut to several pieces with huge differences between each other in terms of consumption, production, education and living standard. In the same land that you call China, you can find very rich people who can afford the most luxury jewelry in the world, and a large amount of young men in or from rural areas who can't even have enough money to live on or support their family, and lot of people like me form the city who owns a laptop and have fairly good education and can speak fluent English.

The situation is CHANGING, in a way to a better status, while in another way into a worse situation. Corruption is the biggest problem that are shaking the ground of the Party, the legal system, the widening wealth gap. BUT through studying history, I know many developed countries, European countries or US all have a period of time when corruption was terribly damaging the country and the society, and then suddenly all the problems were solved after another period of time due to the overall development of the country.

If we explore the reasons for the wealth gap, "Study Times", a publication backed by the Communist Party School, quoted a famous economist in China, Wu JInglian, who always tell the truth about current economic policies in China, criticising the bad effect and call for care to the poor, saying that many of the new rich had benefited from "money and power" deals between officials and entreprenurs.

"All of the core problems are caused by unequal opportuinty," he said. "Unequal opportunity does not only lead to unfair incomes, but also damages justice and economic effiency."

South China Morning Post, an English newspaper based on Hong Kong has run several articles in recent days discussing the unstabilities warned by Wu Jinliang (Also by many ohter scholars and officals in China) and the possibilities of solving the problems through a gradual process towards democracy, which may first and some are already experimented in lower local governments in China. The website of the South China Morning Post is www.scmp.com, it's very good newspaper with serious journalism. BUT it's not free to read articles on its website.

If you want to know more about the democracy thing in China, there is an article on Asia Times Online, http://www.atimes.com/atimes/China/GI20Ad01.html. I don't quite agree with the author, but the article is quite worth reading.

Posted September 23, 2005 09:04 AM

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