万众瞩目的VIM昨天闭幕了，2007年10月13日至19日出版的第385卷第8550期The Economist为大会出了专题报道：
不过印刷版杂志在内地发行时被统一撕去若干页，分别是——
1，第15页：
The party congress in China
China, beware
Oct 11th 2007
From The Economist print edition
The country’s rulers care too much for their own welfare, and too little about the rural peasants
BASKING in its 2008 Olympic glow, no longer shy at counting itself among the world’s greats and blessed with a still booming economy, China looks the coming power. And so it is, up to a point. Yet as the Communist Party’s bigwigs assemble behind closed doors in Beijing for their five-yearly congress, it is China’s frailties, not its strengths, that preoccupy them.
Not for the first time, Hu Jintao, the party’s boss and China’s president, rightly picks out two big problems: the widening gap between China’s mostly urban rich and its mostly rural poor, and the party’s lack of “internal democracy”—comrade-speak for accountability and the courage to question and debate. In other words, neither China’s Communist Party nor its village dwellers are keeping up as the rest of China changes fast. None of the 1.3 billion ordinary Chinese gets a vote in the party’s secretive conclaves. But among more than 700m left-behind peasants, frustrations are building (see pages 27-29).
As in any fast-developing economy, for all its successes China’s breakneck growth masks a multitude of problems, from rampant corruption and devastating pollution to a frail banking system and the lack of independent courts to uphold the rule of law. Meanwhile, three decades of “get rich quick” advice from party central have left the country divided between a richer coast and still impoverished interior, between upwardly mobile city dwellers and stagnating rural communities. These days, the income disparity between China’s richest few and poorest many (peasants, migrant workers, pensioners) would make many a modern capitalist blush.
From communism to carpet-baggers
Mr Hu has tried to accommodate some demands for change. Most recently, a law was passed that for the first time enshrines private property rights—a huge ideological leap for a party with its origins a long march back in Mao’s communes. But like much else in China, these new rights will benefit mostly city-dwellers; a growing urban middle class will now be able to buy and sell their homes or businesses. In the countryside, where peasants are able only to lease their land, not own it (and not even use it as collateral for loans), the new law will do nothing to rectify the landgrabs orchestrated by venal local officials, who turf people off the land so as to do lucrative deals with carpet-bagging developers.
In this and other ways, the reforms that Deng Xiaoping first launched in China’s countryside 30 years ago have now left its peasants in the ditch. But village dwellers have not only seen their city compatriots get richer quicker; increasingly, their own concerns have also been neglected. Since 1989, when disgruntled workers joined student democracy protesters and it all ended in bloodshed on Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, a ruling party fearful of any further challenge to its power has paid better heed to the grievances of China’s urban masses. Urbanites have won greater freedom to spend their rising incomes as they wish, while much ballyhooed experiments in greater village democracy have gone nowhere. With access to the internet and mobile phones, China’s middle classes can organise themselves to oppose, say, the siting of an unwanted chemicals factory and thus draw government attention. Despite many thousands of village protests each year against corrupt officials, poor medical services and bad schools, China’s peasants—more dispersed, less organised and therefore more easily ignored or suppressed—can usually do little but seethe.
Mr Hu bemoans China’s widening inequalities, but has so far done little to bridge them. In fact there is much that could improve the peasants’ lot. Growth at any cost has led to a tax system that unduly favours the wealthy regions that generate their income through industry. Central government could adjust that. It could help further by shouldering a much bigger share of the costs of basic health care and education in the rural areas. Of the five tiers of government, a couple could be stripped away and not be missed. Indeed, thinning the ranks of idle cadres with their fingers in the coffers would ease the financial burden on China’s hard-pressed villagers.
Shooting for trouble
Are such reforms too extensive and costly for a still developing country such as China? No longer. Four years ago, China put its first man in space (only the third country to do so, after Russia and America), at what true cost the government will not say. Now it is aiming for the moon, at a cost of many more billions: its first (unmanned) moon-shot is expected to take place soon. Like the Olympics, China’s space programme is an expensive publicity stunt, designed to encourage nationalist fervour in a population—and a party—long since bored with the maxims of Marx, Lenin and Mao.
Another way in which Mr Hu and his comrades could help the peasants would be to divert some of the double-digit annual increases in defence spending to help the estimated 40% of China’s villages that have no access to running water. The trouble is that China’s military build-up has become the measure of the party’s commitment to another nationalist cause that it has stoked in an effort to bolster its tattered credentials: the eventual recovery, by persuasive hook or military crook, of the island of Taiwan, which China claims as its own.
So far the combination of this appeal to nationalism and the pursuit of economic growth at almost any price has helped the party maintain its grip. But just as China’s periodic shrill threats to Taiwan threaten the stability of the wider region, so the plight and growing anger of China’s peasantry are a harbinger of potential trouble ahead at home.
It is trouble that China’s Communist Party is increasingly ill-prepared to deal with. For all Mr Hu’s rhetoric about greater internal democracy, the party is too fearful for its own survival to open itself up to a genuine clash of ideas. Although a few brave voices have called for that (see page 33), there has been no open debate in the run-up to the congress about how to address any of China’s pressing rural problems. To add to their burdens, China’s peasants are saddled with a ruling party that is too worried about its own survival to spend more than a little lip-service on theirs.
2，第27页：
Rural China
Missing the barefoot doctors
Oct 11th 2007 | LUOCHUAN
From The Economist print edition
Many a problem lies in the way of a “new socialist countryside”
THE county of Luochuan, on the loess plateau of northern Shaanxi Province, used to be one of China’s poorest places. Today it looks relatively prosperous. The main street of the county seat is lined with hotels and restaurants, and the reddening orchards of this apple-growing district stretch beyond the town. Household net incomes per head in rural Luochuan are now approaching the average for the Chinese countryside. Last year they rose by more than 9%, slightly under average.
During the Maoist purges of the 1960s, this was a place where, according to Luochuan’s official history, “everyone was afraid”. But memories of the Cultural Revolution have long since faded. Luochuan’s state-owned agricultural-machinery factory, which once turned out tanks and hand-grenades for Maoist mobs, has been idle for years and is trying to find a buyer. Farmers can now grow what they want, instead of grain as Mao insisted.
But Luochuan’s rural citizens are nostalgic for the past. They want a public-health system that works. Mao’s system of “barefoot doctors” for country districts, set up in Luochuan in 1970, may have been rudimentary, but at least it was readily accessible and practically free. Public-health care in Luochuan, as elsewhere in rural China, is now in tatters. And the extent of rural discontent is at last becoming known, as western journalists are slowly allowed to explore the backward interior.
In recent years China’s Communist Party has begun to pay attention to a deep malaise in the countryside: the prohibitive cost of health care and education for the rural poor, mounting debts at the lowest levels of government, bloated bureaucracy and a growing wealth gap between rural and urban areas. Riots have become common, fuelled by the attempts of avaricious governments to raise money by selling farmers’ land. Incomes may have been rising, but so has dissatisfaction. In some parts of China, more than 60% of those in dire poverty have been driven there by medical expenses. And for many rural residents the higher levels of schooling are becoming unaffordable.
President Hu Jintao and his prime minister, Wen Jiabao, like to take credit for what they portray as a change of tack. Under their leadership, the party’s emphasis has switched from an all-out pursuit of economic growth to the need for balanced development that takes more account of the country’s poorest. The need, they often say, is to build a “new socialist countryside”. At a five-yearly congress due to begin on October 15th (see page 33), the party, at Mr Hu’s request, will rewrite its own charter to give the president’s theory about the need for “scientific development” (meaning pro-poor and pro-environment) the same sanctity as the philosophies of Mao, Deng Xiaoping and Mr Hu’s predecessor, Jiang Zemin. But among the rural poor there will be little celebration.
“If peasants become better off, the country is secure,” said Mr Wen earlier this year. On average, they are becoming wealthier. For the past three years rural income per head has risen by more than 6% annually in real terms. In the first half of this year, pushed by fast-rising food prices, it was up 13%, the highest increase since 1995 according to official media. But the gap between rural and urban incomes has continued to widen. And progress has been far slower in areas like Shaanxi, far from the prospering coast (see chart 1).
Rural China is still home to about 60% of the country’s 1.3 billion people, but agriculture’s contribution to GDP has fallen from more than a quarter in 1990 to less than 12% today. Central-government spending on agriculture and rural welfare as a proportion of total spending has similarly fallen from 8-11% in the 1990s to 7-8% for most of this decade. Thanks to a booming economy under Mr Hu and Mr Wen, the central budget is getting bigger and its expenditure is growing fast. But outlays on health care and education, as a proportion of total spending, remain lower than they were a decade ago.
Where boom doesn’t reach
The 2,217 delegates to the congress, for whom dissent is taboo, will praise Mr Hu’s achievements. For the first time in Chinese history, farmers, except for tobacco-growers, have been exempted from tax on their land or agricultural production. This has marked the end of a process of rural tax cuts that began well before Mr Hu took office. Since 2003 a new medical-insurance system, involving for the first time a financial commitment by the central government, has been set up in at least 80% of rural counties in place of the long-discarded barefoot-doctor scheme. At the same time, rural children have begun to enjoy free education during their nine years of compulsory schooling—although many still have to pay for their textbooks.
Since 2004 the government, for the first time, has been giving direct subsidies to grain farmers in an effort to keep them growing grain and to curb grain-price rises. This year the subsidies are due to rise 63%, to 42.7 billion yuan ($5.7 billion). Grain output has risen for three consecutive years, the best stint of growth since 1985. But high grain prices may have encouraged this more than the subsidies, which have been largely offset by the rising cost of fuel, fertiliser and other materials.
The changes are a temporary salve, at best. In the case of the medical-insurance scheme, the biggest beneficiaries are the richest peasants. The poorest are just as likely to choose to die at home rather than risk deeper impoverishment of their families by venturing into hospital. The measures also do next to nothing for a huge section of the rural population that has moved to the cities in recent years. These people, perhaps 150m of them, enjoy neither the recent benefits accorded to those who have stayed on the land nor the far greater subsidies enjoyed by their city-born counterparts. In 2004 the World Health Organisation (WHO) described the launch of the new medical system during such a rapid population shift as “the equivalent of launching a ship with a radically new design at the height of a typhoon”. The ship is not weathering well.
In Jiuxian, one of Luochuan’s 16 townships, the hospital is one of the better looking buildings amid a hotch-potch of grey and brown Mao-era edifices (some of them “caves”, built directly in the loess soil and open only at the front). It has recently been rebuilt at a cost of 4.5m yuan. A cluster of crates in the lobby containing new medical equipment has yet to be unpacked. A handwritten notice explains how the township’s 14,000 citizens, most of them scattered in 34 surrounding villages, can enjoy the benefits of what is known as the “new co-operative medical system” introduced three years ago.
The system sounds a good deal. For a premium of a mere 15 yuan (about $2) a year, Jiuxian’s residents can claim back a big part of their hospital costs. Before 2004 they had no insurance at all. Now, beyond a certain threshold (which varies between 100 yuan and 600 yuan according to the quality of hospital) and up to a ceiling of 10,000 yuan a year, they can reclaim between 40% and 60% (the better the hospital, the lower the percentage). The premium is waived entirely for the “impoverished”, of which there are several hundred in the township. For each premium paid, the central government contributes another 10 yuan. The provincial, prefectural and county governments add a total of another 10 yuan to the kitty.
The premiums may sound small for such potentially great rewards. But for rural residents, who earned on average 3,371 yuan last year, 15 yuan amounts to nearly two days’ income. In Luochuan, as in other counties where the insurance scheme has been launched, officials have reported very high rates of participation by farmers, usually over 80%. But a former senior official in Luochuan’s health bureau says participation has not been as voluntary as officials make it out to be.
Yang Xiumei, who is lying on a hard bed in a small, dim ward (left untouched by upgrading) of Jiuxian’s hospital, has picked the wrong time to suffer haemorrhaging and abdominal pains. In her village, says the 44-year-old Ms Yang, officials told farmers that insurance premiums would be deducted, whether they liked it or not, from subsidies they were due to be given for growing grain. But they have received neither the subsidies nor the crucial enrolment booklet for the insurance scheme. The hospital considers her uninsured, and her costs are mounting.
What if Ms Yang had received her booklet? Her insurance would not kick in until she had spent 100 yuan, the equivalent of nearly 11 days’ income for the average Luochuan rural resident. Beyond that she would then be able to claim 60% of her expenses, but these could amount to several hundred more yuan even for a relatively minor complaint. The Jiuxian hospital, with its three doctors, can perform only the simplest operations and provide only basic care. Anything more serious requires a trip to the Luochuan county seat, 20km (12 miles) away. For insured Jiuxian residents who used county-level facilities, average out-of-pocket expenditure in June was 1,219 yuan, or four months’ income.
Unnecessary X-rays
Hospitals are under pressure to push up charges. Jiuxian’s hospital is subsidised by the county government, but only enough to cover 85% of its staff’s wages, which are relatively generous. The rest of its money has to come from fees and selling medicine. The government caps the prices of common medicines, but doctors get round these by prescribing other medicines or ordering unnecessary procedures, such as X-rays. Without changes in the way rural hospitals are funded, poorer farmers will feel little benefit from the new insurance scheme. Henk Bekedam of the WHO says the poor would not even be able to find the cash to pay for treatment at first, even though some of it would be reimbursed.
Researchers from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing have been trying to set up a parallel insurance system in Jiuxian. Under this scheme, farmers have been encouraged—more politely this time—to pay another annual premium of 10 yuan. For this they are offered free consultations and drugs about 25% cheaper than those sold in the hospital. At first the academics tried using hospital staff to administer the scheme, but it quickly became clear that the doctors were not interested in prescribing cheap drugs, only expensive ones. As disgruntled farmers pulled out of the scheme in droves, the researchers scaled back their staff and closed down all but one of their six clinics dotted around the township. Now they have just one doctor, a pharmacist and a nurse manning a clinic-cum-dispensary in the township seat. The participation rate has dropped from 40% to around 12%. Charity donations, which had helped them, have recently run out.
The county and township governments are not keen supporters of the researchers’ efforts. Their main interest is to ensure that Jiuxian’s hospital covers its costs. Funding it more fully from their own budgets would not be easy, especially since almost all agricultural taxes have been abolished. The official media hailed this as the lifting of a centuries-old burden on peasants. But rural governments in areas with few non-agricultural industries, though partly compensated by the central government for their losses, went into budgetary shock.
Cave-dwelling teachers
Zealous officials in Yanan prefecture, of which Luochuan is part, were among the first to respond to Mr Wen’s tax-abolition initiative. Buoyed up by revenues from local oil and gas industries, they abolished agricultural taxes in 2004, resulting in a 200-yuan-a-year net gain on average for farmers in Luochuan, according to the official media. But Luochuan’s county and township governments struggled merely to meet payroll commitments for their staff. Subsidies received by Luochuan to cover its loss of tax income were fixed at the level of its agricultural tax revenues in 2002. But miscellaneous fees imposed on farmers earlier in the decade were lost too, according to a report in Macroeconomics, a monthly journal published in Beijing.
Revenue losses have coincided with another extra financial burden: Mr Wen’s policy of free education for rural children. Education expenditure from the county budget increased by 20.8% last year, compared with increases of only 6.9% and 5.6% in the previous two years. More money provided by the central, provincial and prefectural governments has helped, but not enough. Once again, Yanan prefecture has chosen to do things the hard way. It has required all schools not only to abolish fees (as ordered by the central government), but also to subsidise all boarders and give free textbooks to everyone. Luochuan county has to pay 10% of the cost of these extras from its own coffers.
At Anmin Junior Middle School, next to the county seat, so much money is flowing in to subsidise the free education programme, which began in Luochuan in 2005, that the school is handing out ten yuan in cash to boarders’ families every term. Last year, with a special grant of around 2.4m yuan, the school knocked down the teachers’ “cave” dwellings and built smart new dormitories for them. The school’s headmaster, Gao Feilong, says the dropout rate is now zero. In the 1990s soaring fees were forcing some of Luochuan’s pupils to quit school.
A survey conducted by Shenzhen University found 82% of farmers in Luochuan were happy with the recent school-fee reforms. But they were far less happy with the quality of teaching and school facilities. Fixing these problems would require a lot more money from a county that is already spending a quarter of its budget on education (mostly on teachers’ wages). To cut costs, Luochuan has closed down nearly half of its 320 primary and middle schools since 2003, resulting in lay-offs for more than 700 teachers and forcing many more children to board. At Anmin School about half of the pupils live in a cramped, spartan dormitory building in a muddy yard at the back of the barrack-like complex. There may be no dropouts now, but for poorer students the huge cost of continuing their education beyond this level is a disincentive to study hard.
Luochuan’s finances would work far better if it cut its bloated bureaucracy. It is trying. The county government has, in effect, taken over management of township budgets, stripping the townships of what little power they still retained. Some provinces are now bypassing both the prefectural- and township-level governments in order to get funds more directly to rural areas. But experiments with rural democracy—hailed by the party in the 1990s as a great way to improve public supervision of how money is spent—have proved too challenging to the party’s political grip.
Many Chinese experts say the burden of supporting basic health care and education should be shifted to higher-level governments. That done, prefecture and township governments could be massively trimmed or eliminated altogether. But neither widespread lay-offs in an already volatile countryside nor a huge increase in central-government spending are palatable options for China’s leaders.
Nor are they rushing to address the needs of those millions of country-dwellers who have moved in recent years to work in urban areas. Even peasants who have been living for several years in cities are still classified as rural residents, and as such are often excluded from urban welfare schemes. A former Luochuan resident working in Beijing, 700km to the north-east, would have to go back to the county for medical treatment if he wished to get reimbursement. Only a few million migrant workers enjoy medical insurance provided by their urban employers. From January 1st it will be compulsory for employers to offer it. But since many migrants are employed informally, without contracts, this will not make much difference.
Such problems need urgent attention. Officials say that by 2020 about 60% of the population will be living in cities or towns. This implies that more than 200m more people will move from the countryside by then. That figure may be too alarmist: there are signs that urban factories are running out of migrant labour, and reports that bad working and living conditions in some cities are deterring the rural poor. But over the coming years China’s rural problems will increasingly become urban ones. China and its cities will need to spend a lot more to deal with them.
3，第33页：
China’s Communist Party congress
Still in Mao’s shadow
Oct 11th 2007 | BEIJING
From The Economist print edition
And 1.3 billion people are still in the dark about what their leaders want
IN THE absence of serious elections, the big event in Chinese politics is the five-yearly congress of the ruling Chinese Communist Party. From October 15th Hu Jintao, who has led the party since the last congress, will preside over a gathering that offers him the chance to demonstrate his authority and explain his vision for China in the next five years. On neither count is he expected to inspire.
The 2,217 delegates, most of them officials chosen in rigged elections to attend the meeting in Beijing’s Great Hall of the People, will voice no criticism of Mr Hu’s record. He has done next to nothing to fulfil repeated promises of greater democracy within the party. The congress, expected to last about a week, will be as tightly scripted as the 16 others in the party’s 86-year history. Delegates will name a new Central Committee of around 200 members. This will meet at the end of the congress to name a new Politburo to rule the country until 2012. Mr Hu and his colleagues will ordain the outcome.
But rumours abound that Mr Hu has been having trouble appointing the exact Politburo he would like. Observers had long assumed that the Politburo’s Standing Committee—the apex of power in China—would include a new member to be groomed as Mr Hu’s heir-apparent. This would be Li Keqiang, the 52-year-old party chief of Liaoning Province in the north-east. Now rumours suggest that Mr Hu has been forced by colleagues to promote two heirs-apparent. The second is said to be Xi Jinping, 54, party chief of Shanghai.
The two men will presumably have to contend for the top slot in 2012. Chinese politics is too opaque to know how the succession of either man would change the way the country works. This was not always so. In the build-up to the party’s 13th congress in 1987 the emergence of Zhao Ziyang as Deng Xiaoping’s chosen successor appeared to herald an era of liberalisation, Mr Zhao being a noted reformist. But he was deposed by hardliners two years later during the Tiananmen Square unrest and kept under house arrest until he died in 2005. Since the early 1990s Chinese leaders have succeeded in presenting a far more unified front. Mr Hu, Mr Xi and Mr Li have no apparent policy differences.
They could represent different factions, however. Mr Xi, a popular theory has it, is closer to Mr Hu’s predecessor, Jiang Zemin, who remains a behind-the-scenes force in Chinese politics at the age of 81. One of Mr Jiang’s pet projects, a glass and titanium egg-shaped opera house costing $360m opposite the Great Hall of the People, opened last month after years of controversy about plonking such an extravagant oddity in the nation’s political heart. On a tour of the building this week for the foreign press, a construction official told The Economist that Mr Jiang had sung to staff there during a recent inspection.
Both Mr Xi and Mr Li (who both have degrees in law) have received considerable attention from China’s state-controlled media. Mr Li’s leadership has been praised for a massive programme of building affordable housing and clearing slums. Mr Xi’s leadership has been implicitly linked with Shanghai’s recent accomplishments, even though he only took over as the city’s chief in March following the dismissal of his predecessor, Chen Liangyu, for alleged corruption. Among notable events since then have been the topping out in September of the Shanghai World Financial Centre, which will be the country’s tallest building and, says the official press, the third-tallest in the world. Mr Xi enjoys the additional distinction, which China’s official press prefers not to mention, of being the son of a late revolutionary leader, Xi Zhongxun. Such “princelings” appear to be on the rise.
If both men are elevated to the Standing Committee, the country’s obscure politics will be shrouded by another veil of uncertainty. After Mr Hu was promoted to the Standing Committee at the party’s 14th congress in 1992, it was taken almost as read that he would eventually succeed Mr Jiang (even though he was Deng’s choice, not Mr Jiang’s). Liberals in the party have long argued that there should be more open competition for top posts. But Mr Hu is not in favour of elections for his job. The outcome is more likely to be determined by factional squabbling.
In the build-up to the congress there has been a ritual upsurge of complaints by liberals that the party is stalling on the issue of making China more democratic. In the latest edition of Yanhuang Chunqiu, a Beijing monthly, Mao Zedong’s former secretary, Li Rui, gave warning of looming chaos in China unless it embraces democracy. Mr Hu, however, though keen to impress the rest of the world with China’s openness as it prepares to host the Olympic Games, fears the opposite is true: that political reform could trigger a tidal wave of discontent from democrats and the underprivileged.
Indeed, he shows no interest even in more cautious suggestions. Early this year a party journal, Study and Pursuit, published proposals for reforming the party- congress system. These included convening congresses annually, imposing a 50% limit on the proportion of delegates who hold official rank and electing fewer delegates, in order to cut costs and encourage genuine debate (of which there is currently none). This year the number of delegates has actually been increased by more than 100 compared with 2002. So the applause for Mr Hu will be even louder.
