Chinese Suffering from Poverty, Uneven Development, Experts Say

[Lydia Leftcoast]

Some of the advocates of corporate-style "free" trade point to China as a success story. Aside from the way China now holds so much of our foreign debt, look at what the new economy has done to China.
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The widening economic divide between rural and urban China — and between its coastal and western regions as well — will only get worse as its spectacular economic growth continues, a Chinese scholar warned at a recent symposium in Tokyo.
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Most of the sectors that expanded rapidly in the past four to five years — such as steel, cement, aluminum, electricity, coal and nonferrous metals — are simply making up for the low or even negative growth seen in their output until 2002, Yuan said. These are the sectors where serious supply shortages occurred between 2003 and 2005, he said, justifying their rapid rise in output.
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A more serious concern regarding the sustainability of China's economy, Yuan warned, is the worsening poverty in rural villages and in China's central and western inland regions. These villages and regions, he said, have failed to reap the benefits of the "narrow-based" development focusing on the coast of eastern China.

The wealth gaps are a serious problem that will get even worse as China's rapid growth continues, he said. Such contradictions will become even more evident if the country maintains policies from the past 30 years that let certain areas precede others in economic development. The inland villages are becoming increasingly unhappy that poverty in some areas is even worse than it was before the reforms began in the 1980s, he noted.

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