荒诞者共和

China Daily
2007-08-15

There is growing dissatisfaction toward rich people, according to a new online poll.

The poll by the China Youth Daily in collaboration with Sina.com has highlighted the apparent discontent over the country's widening income gap.

Nearly 8,000 people filled in online questionnaires last week, and when asked to use three words to describe society's rich, the top responses were "extravagant", "greedy" and "corrupt".

About 57 percent of those polled said that "extravagant" was the best word to describe the rich, followed closely by "greedy".

Ironically, despite their dissatisfaction, 93 percent of those polled wished they could be rich too, and that richer people should be "socially responsible".

Some 33 percent of respondents also praised rich people for being "smart".

Nearly 90 percent of respondents agreed that most people in society, including themselves, were willing to speak up for the poor but were reluctant to take action and actually do something for them.

The survey comes on the heels of a heated debate over comments made by renowned economist Mao Yushi, who said he was "speaking for the rich and working for the poor".

Chen Guangjin, sociologist at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) said it was a pity that too many Chinese scholars "stand on the stance" of the rich when they come up with their theories.

"When ordinary people complain about the rich, they point at the illegal practices of accumulating wealth and also corruption," Chen said.

"There is still no clear evidence that the general public has bad feelings for the rich."

A report released by the Asian Development Bank last Wednesday revealed that China's Gini coefficient - an indicator of the wealth divide - rose from 0.407 in 1993 to 0.473 in 2004.

An earlier CASS report said that the richest 10 percent of Chinese families now own more than 40 percent of all private assets, while the poorest 10 percent share less than 2 percent of the total wealth.

The country's income disparity is close to that of Latin America, the report which came out in January, said.

Jianqiang Liu
Worldwatch Institute
June 19, 2007

China Watch is a joint initiative of the Worldwatch Institute and Beijing-based Global Environmental Institute (GEI) and is supported by the blue moon fund.

China’s worsening environmental crisis is catalyzing a growing environmental movement in which the public is resisting special interest groups and opposing the government’s environmentally “unfriendly” behaviors. More significantly, this movement represents a push toward greater democracy in the country, with the public fighting for its civil rights through protecting the environment.

Although citizens, NGOs, and journalists suffering from China’s deteriorating environment did not set out to turn their environmental efforts into a democracy movement, they have found more democratic space in the “green” realm. They are able to write articles, hold open forums, launch grassroots groups, and educate the public, influencing the behaviors of both the government and special interests. Rather than ideology, they have paid more attention to protecting individual environmental rights—breathing fresh air, drinking clean water, protecting the homeland, and conserving nature. Citizens also have more political space in the environmental arena because the government is undertaking parallel efforts to improve the environment.

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Andy McKay, Tim Conway, Ed Anderson, Joy Moncrieffe, Laure-Hélène Piron and Tammie O'Neil, with Simon Maxwell
Poverty and Public Policy Group
Overseas Development Institute, UK

Country case studies addressing growth, inequality and poverty reduction in Brazil, China and South Africa, were presented at the project workshop held in London on 4-5 December 2003. Fitting within an overall project approach based on a conceptual paper on inequality in Middle Income Countries (MICs) prepared by ODI, the findings formed the basis for an overall synthesis report and briefing note also prepared by ODI and feeding into ongoing DFID discussions on inequality and their Middle Income Country Strategy. The workshop also involved presentations from other leading agencies and researchers working on inequality.

Prepared as part of a DFID-funded project seeking to increase understanding of the links between growth, inequality and poverty reduction in MICSs, the Concept and Synthesis papers prepared by ODI survey the key conceptual issues relating to the understanding of inequality, and policy responses to it.

The motivation for the overall project is that Middle Income Countries account for substantial absolute levels of global poverty and deprivation despite the fact that their average income levels are higher compared to Low Income Countries. This reflects high levels of inequality in many cases. Such high (and sometimes increasing) levels of inequalities threaten to be a major barrier to the attainment of the MDGs in Middle Income Countries, as well as globally. They also represent important risks to social stability and progress, as well as being unjust in their own right to the extent that they reflect widespread social exclusion and discrimination. In other words, the focus on inequality in this project is both for instrumental reasons (its likely impact on poverty reduction, growth rates and social stability) and for intrinsic reasons (high levels of inequality being undesirable in and of themselves).

The project focussed on both economic and non-economic aspects of inequality, recognising that the latter (social, political and governance dimensions) are currently less well understood.

For this work programme, briefing papers (downloadable below) on inequality previously prepared by ODI for DFID also provide relevant background by reviewing issues in relation to (i) concepts and measurement of inequality; (ii) the economic links between inequality, poverty reduction and growth; and (iii) policy issues in responding to inequality.

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Hannah Beech
The Times
Aug 27, 2006

The text message on my cell phone came last Thursday as I was standing in my Shanghai apartment, surrounded by packing boxes and bubble wrap. Preparing to leave after more than six years in China, I was feeling nostalgic. This is not an easy place to be a journalist--phones are often tapped, sources sometimes harassed--but the economic developments that have transformed this country bring with them an infectious optimism. People's lives are getting better. The polite packer helping to direct traffic in our apartment told my husband he had helped move us into our flat three years ago. Back then he was a simple day laborer; now he's a foreman. Many stories in China have a similar upward trajectory. If for nothing else, I would miss China for the promise it holds.

Then came the text message: "Chen Guangcheng has been sentenced to four years and three months' imprisonment." I first met Chen a year ago. A native of China's eastern Shandong province, the self-schooled legal activist came to Shanghai to publicize the plight of women who had been forced to undergo abortions or sterilizations as part of the nation's family-planning campaign. China has tried for more than two decades to lower its population through its "one-child" policy, but the coercive measures used in Shandong's Linyi region are now illegal. By publicizing abuses committed by local bureaucrats, Chen believed he could persuade higher-level officials to step in and stop them.

A few days after our first meeting, we got together again in Beijing. As we were leaving, Chen had a last request: Would it be possible to see what I looked like? He lifted his hands and felt my face. My nose, he commented, wasn't especially big for a foreigner's. Chen was blinded by a fever as a small child. His hands--as well as an unusually supportive family that reads out loud to him everything from law books to letters from peasants requesting his legal aid--are what allow him to see the world.

Just hours after our interview, Chen was detained by security officials, who had traveled hundreds of miles from Linyi to Beijing. For the next six months, he was kept under virtual house arrest. Despite the harassment, which included several beatings, he remained hopeful: the State Family Planning Commission in Beijing admitted publicly that Linyi officials had broken the law. Chen kept in contact with foreign journalists through cell phones that friends and family smuggled in for him. Last September I wrote a story for TIME about forced sterilizations in Linyi. The magazine subsequently named Chen to its annual list of the world's 100 most influential people.

After trying to leave his village without official permission last March, Chen was arrested again. The local police finally announced in June that he was being held on charges of damaging property and organizing a mob to disturb traffic. (Witnesses on the scene dispute the allegations.) In previous years, a plea from the U.S. State Department might have helped get a Chinese political prisoner released. But foreign pressure has less effect these days, in part because the international community holds little leverage. China is the world's factory. It holds bountiful foreign-currency reserves. It will be host to the Olympics in 2008. The balance has shifted from China's feeling as if it needs the world to the world's needing China.

The news that Chen was sentenced, after a two-hour trial, to more than four years in prison has left his supporters stunned. His wife Yuan Weijing, who has been under house arrest for months, says her 3-year-old son tells her he doesn't want to start supper until his father comes home. "Today," she said over a cell phone, "I had to tell my child that his father won't be joining him for dinner for a long time."

I had been worried how Yuan would receive our call. I wondered whether she would blame the international media for publicizing the forcible family-planning campaign, perhaps prompting Linyi officials to take out their anger on her husband. But Yuan wasn't bitter. "I am proud of my husband," she said, "and I want the outside world to know what is truly happening."

As I packed up the final boxes for my move from Shanghai, I couldn't shake the disgust I felt over Chen's sentencing. But I was also moved by Yuan's conviction that the outside world needs to know what is happening in Linyi. Hers is a faith based on a system that has not yet taken root in China, one in which justice prevails and heroes like her husband are honored. If Yuan can have hope in China's future, I should too. I can't pack that sense of optimism in a box, but it is something I will treasure long after I leave.

Simon Elegant
The China Blog, Times
July 16, 2007

This is a follow up on my previous post about the travails of the blind activist Chen Guangcheng and his wife, Yuan Weijing. You may recall that Yuan fled her home in rural Shandong Province to travel to Beijing. She hoped to meet a U.S. embassy official and international journalists in an attempt to publicize her husband's plight.

On Sunday, a colleague and I went to visit Chen's wife, who has been holed up in a friend's apartment since she arrived in the capital on July 6 because of fears she might be kidnapped by policemen from her province and taken back to Shandong. As this is exactly what happened to her husband two years ago (right after meeting with a TIME reporter, which wasn't a good omen), it isn't an unreasonable fear. Yuan's hosts, activist Hu Jia and his wife Zeng Jingyan, had warned us that there were three carloads of police outside the gates of their compound and that some diplomats who had visited earlier weren't allowed to enter. We were pretty confident we would be let in, though. The new "Olympic" rules allowing foreign journalists to interview anyone so long as they give their consent have been in effect for seven months now, and the police are well briefed on them, at least in Beijing.

The only visible guard was a plump, polite fellow in a striped polo shirt and shiny brown patent leather shoes. He told us he was a policeman (initially in English, sort of) and then proceeded to laboriously record the details of our journalist IDs. He also asked when our appointment was and even smiled sheepishly when I told him and added that he probably knew that already.

In Hu Jia's fourth floor walk up apartment we were introduced to Yuan, who was wearing a t-shirt emblazoned with a picture of her husband. She explained that she had decided to come up to Beijing after seeing Chen in jail four days after he was beaten. He still had bruises all over his body and couldn't walk upright because of blows he had received to his side, she said. Yuan described how he had refused to allow his head to be clean shaven. "He didn't mind having it cut short but a totally shaved head is a sign of a criminal. 'I am not a criminal, I am a Chinese worker," he told them." His defiance seemed to have angered someone in authority and some six or seven other convicts jumped him and beat him. Then he was pushed to the ground, his hands manacled behind his back, and held down while his head was shaved. Yuan said the prison authorities later told her that they had conducted a medical exam on Chen and there was no evidence of his having been beaten. They also told her that in fact, he had attacked a fellow prisoner, not the other way round. Such denial of what she had seen so clearly alarmed her. Yuan said she was worried that he might be beaten again or be subjected to other punishments, hence her trip to Beijing. She said she was trying to make her case that, as he is incapable of looking after himself because of his blindness, he ought to be freed to serve out his term at home as is specified under Chinese law. Right now, Yuan is waiting until the 18th, when Chen's mother and brother will seek to visit him in jail (the family is allowed to visit once a month but the authorities have been threatening to suspend visitation rights because of the have been getting from the foreign media about Chen's condition). If he hasn't suffered any further problems, Yuan says she'll go home to Shandong. Otherwise, she'll try and get his story out again, though it's not clear exactly how she plans to do that.

"There are other people in jail but Chen's case is very unusual because he is blind and it is so clear he is in jail unjustly," Yuan said. She's right of course. What makes Chen's case so odd is that Beijing could make most of the controversy around it go away by doing what she's asking. He'd still be confined to his house and unable to organize or agitate or probably even talk to the media. But so long as he is in prison and getting beaten, a helpless blind man who did nothing more than try and help a group of women who were being forced to undergo sterilization by overzealous family planning officials, it's a story that will continue to draw attention from reporters.
. We drank tea and talked. Yuan's daughter came out to play. Some guys arrived to install an extra bed. Then we left with all the usual polite exchanges. It was all very normal and slightly surreal to think that if she ventured a few meters out the door of the apartment block she would be bundled into a white van they had spotted earlier and driven back to Shandong. On the way out, the policeman, who had found himself a folding chair and was slumped in it, belly bulging, waved to us and called out a cheery, "bye bye."