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With China's once-a-decade leadership transition set to get underway on Thursday, pundits and scholars around the globe are speculating about what Beijing's new top brass will -- or won't -- do to tackle the country's many problems. But what change are Chinese people themselves expecting to see?
If an online survey conducted by the state-run China Youth Daily newspaper is anything to go by, the answer is one that recalls the idealogical roots, if not the recent reality, of China's ruling party: income redistribution.
Of 11,405 Chinese Internet users polled by the Social Survey Center of China Youth Daily last week, 66.6% said they thought the country was likely to pursue reforms related to income distribution in the future, the newspaper reported on Tuesday (in Chinese). Second on the list were reforms aimed at curbing corruption (57.8%), followed by reforms of the economic system (53.5%) in third.
The results exceeded 100% because respondents were allowed to choose multiple options. Nearly half of respondents were born in the 1980s, with 17.7% born in the 1990s and the rest born in the 1970s, the newspaper said, adding that most of those who took part in the poll earned less than 5000 yuan ($800) per month.
China 'huge income disparity' was likewise the top choice when Internet users were asked to identify factors that could drag down the country's development in the next decade, garnering votes from more than 75% of respondents.
Measuring income inequality is difficult in China, in part because rich Chinese families are loathe to reveal the true extent of their wealth. Even so, independent research suggests the income gap is expanding rapidly. Where the vast majority of Chinese families were on roughly equal financial footing prior the launch of economic reforms in the late 1970s, one academic survey of more than 8000 Chinese households conducted by Texas A&M professor Gan Li in 2011 found the country's top 10% controlling 56% of income a figure that makes China more equal than some African countries.
The dangers of that level of wealth concentration are not lost on Chinese policy makers and their advisers. 'The income gap between urban and rural, between communities, and lack of middle class are factors that could affect social stability,' Zhu Yinghui, a researcher at the International Institute for Urban Development in Beijing, told China Real Time earlier this year.
But anxieties extend beyond the wealth gap. Corruption and abuse of power also scored high on the list of concerns, with 'expanded influence of interest groups' and 'unchecked power' both identified by a majority of surveyed Internet users as problems that could derail the country's future.
Responding to the survey on Sina Corp.'s Weibo microblogging service, prominent economist Xu Xiaonian tied the results together: 'Unchecked power and expansion of interest groups are the causes. A huge rich-poor divide is the result,' he wrote.
For all that, most Internet users reported feeling positive about the future, both their own and the country's, according to the survey: More than half of the respondents said they are confident about China's development and their life in the next 10 years.
The survey also showed that more than 70% of respondents expected a new round of reform in the next decade, though it didn't specify the type of reform.
Among expected social reforms, healthcare was tops with 68.8% of Internet users predicting improvements in the country's medical system, followed by education (62.8%) and food security (60.3%).
While it's unusual for state-run media to publish surveys that portray the country's problems in such a stark light, some Internet users questioned the value of the China Youth Daily poll. 'What is this survey for? The public already knows all this, while the people in power pretend that they never knew,' wrote one user of Sina Corp.'s Weibo microblogging service.
'The survey reveals public opinion. But where are the solutions?' wrote another.
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Post By：2012/11/13 11:27:21
