China counts cost of growth
China’s Communist Party, devoted in recent years to expanding the economy
at any cost, on Wednesday endorsed a new doctrine of harmony that puts more
emphasis on tackling the severe side effects of unrestrained growth.
The annual meeting of the ruling party’s Central Committee formally
adopted President Hu Jintao’s proposal to "build a harmonious socialist
society," a move that some analysts said marks one of the most decisive shifts
since the late paramount leader Deng Xiaoping accelerated the party’s push for
high growth rates in the early 1990s. The leadership declared
that a range of social concerns, including the surging wealth gap, corruption,
pollution and access to education and medical care, must be placed on a par with
economic growth in party theory and government policy. "There
are many conflicts and problems affecting social harmony," the Central Committee
said in a statement released after the close of their four-day planning session
Wednesday. "Our party has to be more proactive in recognizing and dissolving
these contradictions." China’s economy has recently been
expanding at better than a 10 percent annual pace, faster than any other major
economy in the world, and the party shows no signs of attempting to sharply
reduce that rate soon. China needs much higher growth rates than
most developed countries to absorb tens of millions of surplus workers, and even
the plans for addressing environmental problems and creating a sounder welfare
system assume surging tax revenues that will fill government coffers.
"A harmonious society above all needs development," the statement
said. gut the "harmonious society" theme contains a multitude of
political cues that have become essential to Hu as he consolidates his
power. He has campaigned doggedly to reduce the party’s
addiction to state-backed investment projects, politically driven expansion of
industry and infrastructure, and conversion of state-owned land for speculative
real estate development. The fear is that many such projects generate poor
economic returns and add to China’s pollution problems, already among the worst
in the world. Local officials have tended to ignore central
directives on creating a more sustainable and less-speculation driven economy,
partly because they still believe they will not get promoted unless they can
show stellar results expanding output in their domains. Hand in
hand with the "harmonious society" drive, Hu and Zeng Qinghong, the vice
president and the head of the party’s secretariat, have undertaken the most
sustained crackdown on official corruption since the party first embraced
market-oriented economic measures nearly three decades ago. The
anti-corruption sweep has already resulted in the detention of Chen Liangyu, the
powerful party boss of Shanghai, as well as senior officials in Beijing,
Tianjin, Fujian, Hunan and other places. The Central Committee
statement did not commit the leadership to specific targets in reducing the
wealth gap beyond stating that it would need to see improvement by the year
2020. But analysts say the new platform should result in
markedly increased government spending on education and health care, which tend
to be expensive and inaccessible to peasants, migrant workers and etirees, the
vast majority of China’s population. Mao Shoulong, a public
policy expert at People’s University, said Hu was likely to face continuing
obstacles in implementing his plans. "China is still a poor
country that faces many of the problems of rich countries with far more
resources," Mao said. "It is not so easy to change the focus on the leadership
at this stage of development." Hu was likely to face ______ in implementing his plans.