Affordable housing tops list of hot topics for lawmakers
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Affordable housing tops the list of people's concerns according to an online survey ahead of China's annual sessions of political advisers and lawmakers.
It's followed by income disparity, inflation, corruption and jobs.
"People's concerns are down to earth and connected closely to their daily lives," said Huang Renwei, vice president of the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences. "If you want to summarize people's demands with one word, it is 'fairness'."
The annual session of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, China's top political advisory body, opens today, while China's top legislature, or the National People's Congress, begins its annual session on Saturday.
Members of the CPPCC and deputies to the NPC in Shanghai, including Party Secretary Yu Zhengsheng and Mayor Han Zheng, flew to Beijing yesterday morning.
Zhao Qizheng, a spokesman for the CPPCC, said members had submitted 711 proposals by yesterday, among which there were food safety issues and requests for making public the assets of senior officials and managing the Internet's "water army," posters who try to manipulate public opinion.
China has become increasingly aware of food safety issues, as indicated by the stricter penalties meted out for offenders in food-related crimes, Zhao said.
While reducing the number of crimes punishable by death by 13 to 55, the newly revised Criminal Law imposes harsher punishments on offenders in food safety crimes.
The law, for the first time, stipulates that people may face capital punishment if they commit food crimes which result in death or lead to severe consequences.
In the online survey by xinhuanet.com and sina.com, people's housing concerns changed from the need to fight property speculation, a hot topic in past years, to focus on the fair and transparent allocation of affordable housing.
As more affordable housing projects got under way, people's attention shifted to this new solution to the problem of low-income families unable to afford a home.
China plans to offer 36 million affordable homes in the five years to 2015, 10 million of them this year.
Meanwhile, the government has implemented a series of tough measures to tame runaway house prices, including curbs on the purchase of second homes and raising downpayments and interest rates.
Although prices are still high, transactions have fallen steeply in recent weeks due to the measures.
One comment from a survey participant was that regulators should "build up high fences to prevent people driving BMWs from buying affordable homes."
The government announced the improvement of people's living standards as a fundamental aim for the 12th Five-Year Plan (2011-2015), and lowered the gross domestic product target to 7 percent from 7.5 percent in the previous five years.
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