Promising messages need more clarity
- By Manoranjan Mohanty
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E-mail China.org.cn, March 27, 2016
The three major announcements that affect the lives of the Chinese relate to education, employment and poverty eradication. Universalisation of secondary education by raising the average schooling from 10.23 years to 10.8 years and establishing world-class universities are supported by resource allocation. Together with the health measures, and the goal of achieving one more year of life expectancy by 2020, they address a number of critical issues. The training of competent human resources to use human capital for an innovative, knowledge-based, technology-driven economy is a component of the new strategy. As the Chinese population is aging fast, the young population must be adequately educated to find employment. With the welcome decision of couples being allowed to have a second child, this would help human resource development. Secondly, employment strategy has been worked out in a three-pronged plan. The announcement of the creation of 50 million urban jobs in the next five years will greatly help, though it may still be inadequate. Granting hukou status to 100 million migrants is also a positive response to the massive problem of the floating, insecure, rural migrant workers in cities whose number ranges from 300 to 500 million. Equally significant is the decision to locate 100 million rural residents in local towns. Through the construction of infrastructure projects and diversified industries and expanding services this employment strategy would be a welcome policy in the prevailing crisis of unemployment. Helping all rural poor people above the poverty line by 2020 using targeted programmes in rural countries and backward areas was the third important announcement. Three new projects, namely, the North-South link, East-West Corridor and the Yangtze River Development Zone, will involve multi-dimensional development programmes and provide jobs.
Another conspicuous element in the 13th Plan is the firm commitment to green development. The goal is to reduce, per unit of GDP, the use of water by 23%, the consumption of energy by 15% and carbon emission by 18% in the next five years.
Indeed, these are laudable goals for an economy which has impressed the whole world with double digit growth for nearly two decades, and became the world's second largest economy in 2010, and is all set to celebrate the centenary of the founding of the CPC in 2021 and of the PRC in 2049. What then are the areas where more clarity is needed?
Having decided on the medium-to-high growth rate of 6.5 to 7% as the "new normal" and opting for "structural transformation" most pronouncedly in two elements, namely creating an economy driven mainly by domestic demands and restructuring the state-owned enterprises, the question arises as to what kind of demands and whose demands would be created and met. The stated goal of an expanding middle class may be a long term trend. In the five-year perspective expanding employment and income, for the two thirds of the population who are not yet the middle class, even in the Chinese context is a daunting challenge. Second, the outline of the strategy still has a great deal of the old linkage with the global economy - finding a market abroad and getting foreign capital as well as raw materials to China. The "Belt and Road" initiative which aims at creating win-win relations with countries en route, also builds upon the same framework. At a time when every region of the world wishes to build its own production and technological capacity, forging mutually profitable trade and investment relations in a new economic and financial global order, this strategy does not clarify how it supports that process.
Yet, the promising messages of the 13th Five-Year Plan stand out prominently, conveying the fact that China, under the Xi Jinping leadership, has taken the slogan of a "people-centric plan" seriously and is confident of handling the challenges in a slowing global economy.
The author is a well-known political scientist and China scholar based in Delhi.
e-mail: mmohantydu@gmail.com
Opinion articles reflect the views of their authors only, not necessarily those of China.org.cn.
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