While keeping fueling its economy with an eight-percent envisioned gross domestic product (GDP) growth for 2005, China faces an even tougher job to soothe growing uneasiness and discontent among people against widening wealth gap, corruption and social inequality.

At the annual session of the top legislature, Premier Wen Jiabao said his government is bent on resolving problems conflicting interests of the masses of people so as to build a "harmonious socialist society", echoing the call set forth at the Fourth Plenum of the 16th the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee in September 2004 and repeatedly underscored by President Hu Jintao and other Chinese leaders.

In China's political lexicon, goals pledged by top authorities to be scored often infer to things that have to be addressed immediately with an all-out national effort.

One of the most vexing problems lies in tilted wealth distribution. According to a latest survey done by the Institute of Sociology under the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) with a sample poll of 50,000 urban households, the richest 10 percent have an annual per capita income of 13,322 yuan (about 1,600 US dollars) whereas the poorest 10 percent have only some 1,400 yuan.

The wealth gap in China is also shown in statistics released by the United Nations Development Program. The poorest 20 percent of the people in China shared only 4.7 percent of overall incomes or consumption in 2004. Meanwhile, the richest 20 percent took up half of the total, according to the statistics.

Economists usually expect to narrow the wealth gap after an economy strides into the threshold of per capita GDP of 1,000 US dollars as China does right now.

"Sufficient labor supply contains wage increase and illegal gains from corruption also negatively affect distribution," Li Peilin, deputy director of the CASS Institute of Sociology, said in an interview with Xinhua, acknowledging that the two reasons contribute mainly to the problem of mal-apportion.

The noted sociologist suggests the government adjusting its policies on finance, taxation and social welfare to check the yawning gap.

In tandem with the wealth convergence, urbanites in China felt less safe and comfortable in 2004 if compared with the two previous years, according to a recent survey conducted by the Horizon Research, an independent pollster.

Numerous residents surveyed said that a growing number of migrant laborers made them feel somewhat unsafe. Rural migrant laborers, many of whom lost their land, were sometimes unpaid by their employers in cities, and they might find some extraordinary, disturbing outlets to unleash their outcry.

Land seizure constitutes a lethal threat to rural stability. Because of nominal money compensation for land they had lost, some peasants farmers in Tangshan, north China's Hebei Province, lodged protests against their local government, appealing to higher authorities to penalize officials involved.

In a sample poll conducted by from the CASS Institute of Rural Development among 720 rural protesters in Beijing from June 15 to July 14, 2004, researchers found that in 632 qualified feedbacks, 73.2 percent of complaints were owed to the seizure of their land.

Social experts estimated disadvantaged farmers approximately got compensation valued at five to 10 percent of the cost of the land they lost to profit-thirsty real estate developers, who often engulfed nearly half of the land cost.

After careful observation, Prof. Yu Jianrong with the CASS Institute of Rural Development who oversaw the research in this regard, said, land seizure represents the biggest problem in the latest couple of years in China's countryside.

Meanwhile, some factory workers were also disgruntled about the employers of state-owned enterprises. The management sometimes siphoned state assets via irregular buyouts, which usually ignored benefits of workers. The ill-treated unemployed would probably resort to the means of destabilizing the society, including mass protests in defiance of local governments.

Corruption of some ranking officials aroused even more grumbles and undermined morale among the people to some extent. From 2003 to 2004, a tiny handful of officials above the provincial or ministerial level were penalized for embezzling public funds or taking bribes.

"Severity of corruption could not be simply ascribed to low moral standards of the corrupted officials," Li acknowledged, "but also loopholes in administrative mechanism."

Facing nearly 3,000 NPC deputies, Premier Wen pledged to deal appropriately with interest conflicts among the people in China and ensure the greatest sectors of people to enjoy the social wealth.

(Xinhua News Agency March 8, 2005)