Voices from the grassroots

In a one-hour talk with Beijing Review, Chen emphasized several times that his advantage at the CPPCC session was being able to speak for the underprivileged, as his research and investigation as a CPPCC member has allowed him to see the effects of unaffordable medical care and tuition bills on disadvantaged people with his own eyes.

In an online survey conducted by the website of Xinhua News Agency on social issues that deserve the most attention at the annual sessions of the NPC and the CPPCC, top-ranking topics were inflation voted for by 11.5 percent of respondents, high house prices by 9.4 percent, medical care by 9 percent and punishment of corrupt officials by 8.9 percent.

It is not surprising that Chen put forward three proposals on improving medical care, employment promotion schemes and social security.

Before writing his proposal on medical care, Chen traveled to the rural areas in his home county, to find that hospitals in the townships, the economic centers of a population of dozens of thousands of people, were often too shabby and understaffed to function even as a clinic. The poor condition of these hospitals, due to lack of money, made them unqualified to be the designated hospitals for new rural co-operative medical care so that in the case of one township Chen visited, farmers had to travel over 100 km to go to a designated hospital, whose receipts can be partly compensated for by the government-sponsored medical care system.

"The new rural cooperative medical care is really a good thing that can ease farmers' financial burdens for medical care. The problem is that the expense for farmers of long journeys to the hospital can be larger than the medical expenses compensated for by the government," Chen said. He suggested the government should enlarge financial support to rural medical institutions to upgrade their facilities.

Chen has observed the rising inflation in China from a different angle to many. From his daily work of monitoring his local market, Chen witnessed pork prices double in less than a year in 2007, while prices of other daily necessities remained stable. "My suggestion on curbing inflation is that the government should adjust the development of different industries on the macro level. The key is to give incentives to certain industries whose products had experienced the most dramatic hikes," Chen said.