Eva Cheng
As China reported a record-breaking economic growth rate of 9.9% for 2005, its workers were owed wages totalling 21.5 billion yuan (US$2.6 billion). This stark contradiction was revealed during the 10-day annual meeting of China's legislature — the National People's Congress (NPC) — that ended on March 14.
The 2900-delegate NPC is a rubber-stamp body, not much better than the 2000-member advisory "united front" body — the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) — which met concurrently with the NPC.
However, as more working people have their conditions savagely cut or dumped into the scrapheap by the Beijing regime's pro-capitalist policies, more delegates and advisers of the twin peak "representative" bodies are airing some of the discontent that is swelling below them.
For example, NPC deputy Zhou Yuqing, who is also vice-chairperson of the All-China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU), revealed some sobering facts about the conditions facing China's workers:
- According to a 2002 survey, among some first-tier state enterprises the average remuneration of the managers was 12 times that of their workers, rising to 13.6 times in 2003.
- Poor pay and the need to work overtime were prevalent among non-state-owned enterprises, with a China Textile Union survey revealing that workers generally have to work 16 hours overtime a week in order to take their pay to the basic wage level.
CPPCC adviser Zhang Qinglin highlighted the serious extent of wages in arrears, noting that despite governmental efforts in recent years to make defaulting bosses pay up, new wage debt continued to pile up. Zhang quoted the example of China State Construction Engineering Corporation, a major state-owned firm, saying it incurred new wage debt of 7.3 billion yuan in 2004, while paying out 8.6 billion yuan in wages from previous years. In 2005, the corporation paid out 7.9 billion yuan in back wages, while incurring a wage debt of 5.6 billion yuan.
Inner Mongolia NPC deputy Yiu Rongqing said that the wages paid by the "people-run", i.e., private, enterprises were often much lower than the legally set local minimum wage — as little as 200 yuan a month. China's average urban wage last year was 850 yuan a month.
Yiu also observed that the income inequality in some resource-rich provinces was widened as "local fiefdoms" emerged, backed by the "businesspeople wearing red caps", i.e., claiming to be communists, and corrupt state officials.
CPPCC adviser Sun Jiye, an expert on educational issues, said the crux of China's education problems lies in insufficient funding. To illustrate how unreachable a university degree would be for a rural family, Sun said while it costs an average of about 40,000 yuan for a four-year degree while rural income per capita last year averaged only 2936 yuan.
According to the March 1 China Daily, education minister Zhou Ji told a briefing held by the State Council Information Office in Beijing that "China's current expenditure on education, at 2.79% [of GDP] is not very high." At the NPC, deputy Chang Jianghua from Heilongjiang province noted that China's education spending was much less than India's, which is 4% of GDP. The world average is 4.2%.
CPPCC adviser Liu Guangfu told the gathering the shocking figure that government officials' rampant misuse of government-provided transport for private purposes was estimated to be costing at least 200 billion yuan a year. This is about the same amount — 218 billion yuan — that China's central and local governments project to spend on improving education in rural areas over the next five years.
Health care was another hot issue at the twin gatherings, with the problem of declining affordability being highlighted. According to a People's Net report during the NPC, health care's share of government spending declined from 6% in the early 1990s to 4.5% in 2004, adding that China's record of equality in access to health care was the fourth worst in the world (188th out of 192 countries).
NPC chairperson Wu Bangguo told the gathering that in the last year, his office had received 130,000 letters of complaint from the public. The issues most complained about were related to housing demolitions in the urban areas, unpaid fees for construction work and unpaid wages for rural-to-urban migrants.
Reporting on the NPC, the March 10 International Herald Tribune (which is published by the New York Times) commented that, "Few inside or outside China doubt that income gaps, particularly between rural and urban populations, have become so wide as to have become a threat to social stability. Abuse of power by local party officials to enrich themselves at the expense of the powerless has exacerbated the political dangers of the wealth divide. Meanwhile, much urban investment has been wasted on prestigious official buildings."
The IHT criticised Beijing's rulers for not privatising land ownership, claiming this would alleviate rural poverty by allowing peasants to sell the land they farm: "But no, a party that allows well-placed heads of state enterprises to become billionaires almost overnight and whose officials take land from the cultivators for sale for urban property development nevertheless sticks to its historical 'socialist principles' when it comes to farmers and their land." In reality, while all land in China remains nominally state property, since the early 1990s the right to use land has increasingly become tradeable. This trade in land use is now a multi-billion-dollar market.
From Green Left Weekly, March 22, 2006.
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