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China shifts focus to poor with 'New Deal'
(AP)
Updated: 2006-03-11 09:58
BEIJING (AP) _ Chinese government have launched their most
ambitious initiative in decades, promising billions of dollars in social
spending and farm aid this week to help the 800 million people in its neglected
countryside catch up with its booming cities.
A Chinese woman
pours water into her container near a newly dug aqueduct in Xiangfan,
China's Hubei province March 6, 2006. Premier Wen Jiabao told parliament
on Sunday that China would channel its surging economic growth to improve
living conditions of rural people and narrow the widening gap between the
country's rich cities and restive countryside.
[Reuters] | The blueprint unveiled at the meeting of China's parliament rivals U.S.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt's job-creating New Deal of the 1930s in scale,
and is aimed at easing mounting tensions over the growing gap between China's
rich and poor.
But Beijing faces daunting challenges making it work in the countryside,
where control over local leaders is limited, abuses are common and anger at
corruption and land seizures is rising.
"The countryside is very much like a lawless place," said Ding Xueliang, a
former Communist Party official who teaches at the Hong Kong University of
Science and Technology.
The plan for a "new socialist countryside" promises new schools, hospitals,
roads and other aid to the countryside, where many people are as poor as ever
while a small elite have prospered from two decades of economic reform.
The programs are the starting point of what the ruling party has said will be
an effort lasting at least a decade to shift development resources to the
countryside.
"China is now standing at a new historical starting point," Premier Wen
Jiabao said Sunday in a speech to parliament delegates.
Ding said the current leaders are better aware of what is going on than
previous generations.
President Hu Jintao and Wen spent many years in Tibet and other impoverished
regions, and they have extensive contacts outside Beijing.
"They know much more about the realities in the terribly poor regions," Ding
said.
Thanks to annual economic growth above 9 percent and surging tax revenues,
the government can afford to invest in the countryside, where incomes average
only 3,255 yuan (US$400;euro320) a year.
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