Housing and harmony have never been so closely connected at
least in the eyes of researchers in the Chinese capital.
As the political hub of a country that promotes the strategy of
"building a harmonious society", Beijing is among the top Chinese
cities with the highest housing rates, a phenomenon which
researchers yesterday said harmed harmony.
Beijing's housing price growth was the fastest among 70 major
cities in China in October. Last month, it fell second only to
Shenzhen, a booming southern city close to Hong Kong, according to
the latest official statistics.
Prices of commercial houses in Beijing jumped by 16.4 percent in
the third quarter of 2006 year-on- year, compared with 13.7 percent
income growth for local residents in the same period.
"The exorbitantly high prices have by far exceeded the
purchasing power of most residents and prejudiced their interests,"
Dai Jianzhong, a researcher with the Beijing Academy of Social
Sciences, said yesterday.
In 2005, an average Beijing family would have to use all its
income for 11 straight years to pay for a house that could ensure
the per capita housing area meet the city's average of nearly 26
square meters, according to Dai, editor-in-chief of the 2007 Social
Development Report of China's Capital.
"The housing issue is causing social panic and runs against the
efforts of building a harmonious society," he said following the
release of the annual report yesterday in Beijing.
The "crazy" price hike has occurred against a backdrop of
measures that the central government put into place to cap housing
prices over the past two years, and even in Shanghai, whose
residents' income is higher than Beijing's, housing prices have
begun to plummet, Dai said.
Compared with 2005, the transaction price of land for
residential construction in Beijing in fact dropped by 12 percent
last year, when there was no marked price rise in building
materials, meaning real estate developers were "profiteering", Dai
said.
"If the current government policies fail to meet their goal,
there will come more stringent regulations, which, instead of
curbing the margin of increase as hoped by realty developers, would
trigger a drop in housing prices," Dai predicated in his
report.
Dai said the government's regulations on the real estate market,
enaced two years ago, conforms to the will and interests of the
public, but no substantial changes have taken place since then,
resulting in a kind of "wrestling match" between property
developers, the government and consumers.
The public has pinned their hopes on the central authorities to
resolve the housing issue, which is one of their top concerns, he
said.
Addressing the most pertinent concerns of the public has been
listed as one of the goals of building a harmonious society in
China, which also aims to enable all the people to share its social
wealth, and forge an ever closer relationship between the people
and government.
"I believe there will be an outcome in this wrestling match
before the 17th national congress of the Communist Party of China
(scheduled for the second half of this year), and Beijing will be
the first to react to the outcome," Dai said.
By yesterday, half of online voters participating in a survey on
the www.focus.cn, a popular housing information portal, said they
believed housing prices would rise this year, compared with nearly
70 percent of voters who thought so three weeks ago.
The housing issue was also a key concern of the Beijing
municipal political advisers and law makers during their annual
sessions last week and this week.
Liu Yaowei, who was attending the Fifth Session of the 10th
Beijing Municipal People's Political Consultative Conference, which
concluded yesterday, proposed the government build more cheap
houses to be rented by the low income segment.
"If people would not rush to buy new homes, the supply and
demand will be balanced, and ultimately the price will be
stabilized," he said.
Strikingly, Dai's report listed rental fees as the largest
source of investment income for Beijingers last year.
Dai did not specify how much the rentals contributed to the
city's per capita urban income of 16,677 yuan ($2,138), earned
between January and October last year.
In addition to housing, income disparity is a thorny problem in
the capital city of China, according to the report.
The per capita disposable income of the city's low-earners,
which accounted for 20 percent of the city's population, was 8,150
yuan ($1,045) last year through October, an increase of 14.9
percent from a year earlier; while that of the high-earning bracket
was 30,964 yuan ($3,970), or more than three times as much.
At least half of 92 Beijing government officials, surveyed by
the Beijing Municipal Academy of Social Sciences in November, said
they believed the problem of the income gap in Beijing had further
worsened last year.
Nearly 62 percent of the local officials said they thought the
current disparity was not reasonable, according to Gao Yong,
another researcher with the social sciences academy.
"The income gap problem has emerged prominently in each of our
recent surveys," Gao said. "This is a problem that must be tackled
in the city's social development."
An equally pressing problem that will affect the "harmony" in
Beijing is about jobs for college graduates and schooling for
children of migrant workers.
Beijing had 678,000 college and university students at the end
of 2005, at least 70 percent of them said they hoped to work and
live in Beijing after graduation, the Municipal Bureau of
Statistics found in a survey last year.
"It is hardly possible for Beijing to create so many jobs for
them," Dai said, adding that if they stay in the capital, a large
portion of them will join the jobless ranks.
Beijing's registered unemployment rate was 2.11 percent last
year, but experts believed the actual jobless rate was far higher,
and at least one-third of the jobless were aged below 35, according
to Dai.
"The unemployment issue would be further complicated if
youngsters with higher education couldn't be employed," Gao said.
"This will further add uncertainties to the social harmony and
stability."
College and university students aside, Beijing had a 3.6 million
migrant population at the end of 2005, or nearly one-fourth of the
city's total.
They brought with them 400,000 school-aged children. The figure
represented more than one-fourth of the city's total number of
elementary and high school students, according to Dai's report.
About 100,000 of the children are attending schools not approved
by the government, Dai said.
"The municipal government must guarantee that the children of
the migrant workers can get better compulsory education in Beijing,
as this is the right of the migrant workers who have contributed so
much to (the development of) the capital," Dai said.
Doing a good job in education will lend solid support to the
development of the underdeveloped regions, from which the migrant
workers come from, he said.
(China Daily January 30, 2007)