By M.R. Narayan Swamy, IANS
Beijing : China may be an economic giant, but millions of Chinese are still very poor. If the poverty line is drawn at one US dollar a day, then an estimated 135 million people are mired in poverty. This works out to 10 percent of the population, and China’s Communist leaders are worried by the persisting inequities.
The flip side of poverty
Millions of people in China struggle with poverty, but at the same time China also has the world’s fifth most millionaire households, behind the US, Japan, Britain and Germany.
The number is expected to double by 2011. According to the Boston Consulting Group, China topped the creation of personal wealth at a compound annual rate of 23.4 percent between 2001 and 2006, far outpacing the global growth rate of 8.6 percent.
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Corruption in China worries government
Diplomats say that corruption has become a major cause of worry for the government. “Despite harsh punishments including death penalty, the greed for money has spread to almost all levels of the government and society,” a diplomat said.
The four areas where corruption is most rampant are city infrastructure, land transfers, project construction and real estate development. China experts blame this on the greed for money after decades of tightly controlled socialist economy.
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Communist confusion
Developments in China have confused some of the Communist visitors from India. During a recent trip, an amazed second rung leader of the Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M) told an Indian diplomat: “By god! All these dazzling buildings, Western clothes, so much wealth… what happened to communism?”
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Political revolution
Along with economic reforms, China is also undergoing a silent political revolution. Since 2003, 177,000 members belonging to what are called democratic parties, other than the Communist Party of China (CPC), have been elected to various layers of the People’s Congress. At the last CPC leadership meeting, party documents made repeated references to democracy.
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Chinese are mega readers
China has 573 publishing houses bringing out 13,000 new books annually. There are 1,938 newspapers and 9,500 magazines. The number of Internet users in China has ballooned to a whopping 172 million. Thirty-two billion text messages are sent a month on average. Chinese are also great bloggers.
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Religion gets its place
There are an estimated 85,000 religious sites across China, where the Communists were once openly hostile to religion. An unofficial academic survey in early 2007 placed the number of believers in the country at 300 million.
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Travel and tourism
Every year, about 35 million Chinese travel abroad. China receives 124 million foreign tourists annually. China is the largest outbound tourist nation in Asia.