Whether or not one credits the government rhetoric of creating a "harmonious society," the widening gap between rich and poor has become a hot political issue. We present two different views on the topic.
The Scorned And the Forlorn
by Dorothy J. Solinger
THE BIFURCATION OF Chinese soIJ ciety can be seen in official statistics, such as the fact that the poorest 10% of China's citizenry control a mere 1.4% of total income, whereas the top 10% own a full 45% of total assets. But it is also evident in everyday life. For instance, while migrant workers struggle to provide education for their children, offspring of the urban elite face a shortage of parking spaces on college campuses as more and more drive their own cars to school.
The Communist Party does seem to be listening to the protests and labor disputes arising from this situation, and is attempting to alleviate the inequities and inequalities at their roots. The government is meting out billions of yuan in order to pull up the income of the indigent and expand the size of the middle class, even as it simultaneously seeks to wipe out corruption and clamp down on what it terms "excessively high salaries." Clearly, the political elite are determined to stay atop and ahead of the tides of discontent.
To cite a few examples, the central government has planned fee exemptions and subsidies for students in 592 poor counties; allocated increasing amounts of investment to the western, less developed part of the country and eliminated the rural tax; recently announced subsistence allowances for rural residents in abject poverty and increased the funds for the rural sector by 15.6% a year from 2003; and raised the dibao (minimum living guarantee) such that the outlay for poor relief in 2002 was 20-fold that of 1992. Although the job market is severely compromised and the majority of workers go without welfare guarantees, the government claims it is giving these problems high priority. The results of its efforts remain somewhat clouded, however, by the mixed reviews it has been receiving: some say the numbers of "incidents" and "disturbances" are steadily escalating, others that the reverse is true. When people have been surveyed directly, a majority claim to be contented, with their incomes climbing year by year.
The next decade or so is likely to see a progressive advance of the better-off, both in their advisory capacity and in their clout, along with a few gestures (some substantive, others symbolic) to the disadvantaged, whose members will become entrenched as the socially and politically excluded. China's social future thus appears headed for a politics of complacency and sometimes scorn among the better-off, with a persistence of the present status of the forlorn.
The New Underclass
JUST HOW MUCH poverty is there in China's cities today? This is a subject for various sorts of calculation and speculation, complicated by changing prices over time, differing definitions and standards (whether according to consumption or income), and regional variation. According to the China Human Development Report for 2005, prepared under U.N. auspices, 300 million to 400 million Chinese were living on the margins in rural areas that year. Another estimate around the same time, arrived at in a World Bank study using the norm of $1 a day to divide the poor from the rest, put the number of poor in all of China at just 130 million. However, the World Bank's Development Report, as cited in the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences' 2006 Blue Book of Social Development, put the total at 200 million, while the Asian Development Bank, using expenditure data, found 37 million poor living in the cities.
Using the Chinese government's preferred standard-namely, an annual per capita income of less than 683 yuan (about $85) -the State Council found only 23.65 million rural residents living in abject poverty at the end of 2005. When measured by farmers' net incomes and urbanites' disposable incomes reported in the China Statistical Yearbook for 2004, the rural figure rises to 64.3 million, with another 27.15 million in the cities, for a total of 91.45 million poor in China. For the urban areas alone, estimates for the early 2000s range from 14 million to 37 million.
Whatever the actual figures, they are being exacerbated by China's unemployment. The government had aimed to keep the official urban unemployment rate under 4.6% for 2006, but that goal was apparently not reached, as the target figure was subsequently revised to "below 5%" for the years 2007 through 2010. In 2006, a researcher at Beijing University's China Center for Economic Research estimated the true rate of unemployment to be 10% to 15% and rising, while another scholar found it to be even higher, citing a rate of 16.36%. Meanwhile, roughly 10 million new workers are entering the labor market each year, even as the manufacturing sector's ability to absorb labor is on the decline.
A particularly worrisome development is the mounting number of unemployed college graduates. In 2006 a reported one million applicants competed for a mere 10,000 posts in the national examination for civil servants, and three of every five new university graduates were likely to be jobless. In 2007 the number of young people in search of jobs was expected to rise by 22% over the previous year, while the positions available were down by more than 20%. Clearly concerned, the government is making an effort to alleviate the situation, but it will be difficult to find a solution. Yet these sorts of exigencies do not seem to have affected the political process or produced any political demands for greater inclusion or representation. Protests by baccalaureates have been narrowly focused on the demand for jobs rather than pleas for systemic political change, while neither the poor nor the unemployed have gone to the streets demanding democratic transformation. The ccp's efforts to bring the excluded into the political process have not been encouraging. What has been occurring is that worker and farmer representation in the party has dropped markedly, from nearly two-thirds of the ccr membership in 1994 to less than half by the end of 2003. Figures for workers and farmers in the National People's Congress suggest that by the late 1990s their representation had fallen to just 11% and 8%, respectively, after a high of 27% and 21% in the early 1980s. Further symbolizing the marginality of the lower classes in the NPC, migrant laborers were not represented at all.
Rise of the Middle Class
ACCORDING TO THE National Bureau of Statistics, the annual income of a middle- class family in 2004 was been between 60,000 yuan and 600,000 yuan ($7,500 to $75,000). Members of this stratum are civil servants, company managers, techni- cians, or private business owners-in other words, professional white-collar workers as well as private entrepreneurs.
Because the boundaries of this division of the population are so indeterminate, estimates of its numbers vary considerably. Some put its total at about 65 million in 2005 (which would be 5.04% of the population) and expect the figure to reach perhaps 750 million (45%) by 2020. Others calculate that the "middle stratum" already reached about 260 million in 2003 (20% of the pop- ulation) and will be close to 633 million (38% of the total population) by 2020.
Despite the wide range of these predictions, the upward trend is unmistakable, but the figures must be considered alongside China's 100 million aged population, its 150-200 million migrants, and the 90- 440 million people living in poverty. Each of these population segments is likely to continue growing steadily as well.
One of the newer categories, private entrepreneurs, is also on the rise. The owners of businesses who belong to this group have an average of 1.31 million yuan of registered capital, and numbered 3.65 million in 2004, after increasing at the rate of 810,000 a year since 1995. The category could also be viewed as people participating in China's 2.44 million privately operated firms, and if so its numbers rise to 34 million for 2002 (or 4.62% of the employed population); of this total, 6.23 million were investors. Another 6.43% were small proprietors, small traders, and individual entrepreneurs (getihu). Again, it is difficult to draw hard conclusions from this set of disparate data, except to note that this stratum is quickly expanding and attracting much attention.
Politically, most indications are that the middle class and even more so the wealthy are wedded to, and benefit from, the current status quo. True, these people are sometimes willing to engage in resistance, but so far only in defense of their homes. In any case, the record of success in "pushing back" is not promising, and these people are not inclined to pursue any fundamental political change. Perhaps as a consequence-and also out of the leaders' own hopes-the regime takes these people as its supporters, to judge from official intentions as expressed in the media.
Recently, for instance, the party has been making much of the "new social classes," meaning private businesspeople and self-employed intellectuals, who numbered some 20 million as of 2006. Such elites are publicly praised for their tremendous contribution to both the economic and social progress of the country. In the words of a China Daily article, "The Party says it will give reverence, assistance and guidance" to these people, as they "set the trends for the young generation."
The party-state is obviously keen to co- opt persons of this type, no doubt in the interest of stabilizing society, calling them the future "backbone of Chinese society." Quite unlike those in the lower sections of society, who are becoming increasingly marginalized, many from these new social classes have been incorporated into urban- level branches of the Federation of Industry and Commerce, local people's congresses, and people's consultative conferences.
As of late 2006, 38 of the top 100 business tycoons in the latest edition of China's version of the Forbes list were members of the top organs of the state: 19 were deputies to the National People's Congress (a doubling of such individuals in that body in just one year), with the rest belongingto the National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference. On top of that, more than 200 members of the legislature-or nearly 7%-were private entrepreneurs. The Sixth Plenum of the 16th Party Congress even required that the provinces pick a certain number of Party members from this segment of society as deputies to the 17th Party Congress.
In a related development, in the Party's late 2005 statement celebrating its building of democracy, the section on "the system of multiparty cooperation and political consultation under the leadership of the cpc" preceded the one on grass-roots democracy, making much of the nine "democratic" political parties that purport to represent wealthy businesspeople, and with which the Communist Party allegedly "collaborates."
If that document is any indication, inner-party cooperation and consultation are becoming institutionalized and standardized, and thus more important. Equally telling are the important roles that entrepreneurs play in people's congresses. They also hold leading positions in government and judicial organs and exercise democratic supervision over the party and the state. It is these personages, in particular, whom the Party approaches for advice on constructing its "harmonious society."
Clues to China's near-term political future can be found not only in the overt po- litical behavior of its population but also in the composition and activities of select social groups whose numbers are increasing. These factors suggest that change, when it comes, is more apt to be initiated by the top political decision-makers than by the popular strata within society. Furthermore, the discontented segments of the populace, those with the potential to become activists-ranging from members of nongovernmental organizations, netizens, intellectuals, and artists to peasants rioting over pollution or against the dispossession of their land, people newly conscious of their rights, and those enraged by official corruption- are too geographi- cally dispersed to create broadly based in- fluential movements. Thus there seems to be little potential for organizational suc- cess, since many social barriers separate the members of these groups. Besides, per- ilous risks await anyone who aspires to lead demands for sociopolitical change.
The government appears set to concen- trate on building its "harmonious society," in part through the new alliance with the upper strata of the population. At the same time, it will likely use a growing portion of the state's coffers to quiet those at the base-to keep them minimally satisfied but still politically excluded. The Chinese pol- ity appears to be moving not toward de- mocratization, in which numbers count, but toward elitism. This, then, is a politics of complacency and scorn among the so- cial strata who matter, and a politics of the forlorn for those who do not.
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