Source: The New York Times (Print Edition) March 5, 2007 “China increasing investment in rural areas to quell social discontent”, International
China will increase spending on rural projects that will be primarily aimed to improve schools and hospitals. Social discontent has been increasing with a higher number of protests and riots from rural farmers that are fed up with low wages and land grabs by the government. Providing rural cooperative medical insurance, eliminating most school fees for rural children, and providing subsidies on seeds and equipment to farmers as well as setting minimum prices for grain are only a few of the steps that the government is trying to implement to quell rural discontent with government operations. The government will expand spending by 15.3 percent.
The government may be investing greater amounts in rural planning because it has enough surplus to do so from the massive economic expansion that it has experienced in recent times.
China may be trying to quell social discontent for deeper reasons. It may be seeking to increase spending in other parts of the country to make sure that social discontent will not rise to a greater level that may damage its image of promoting human rights. Top government advisers have recently concluded that an increase in the concentration of the government in solving rural problems has resulted in a decline in protesters by 3,000 from 26,000. Rather than aiming aid at increasing the living standards of the rural areas, the central government is aiming to eliminate opposition. Higher opposition against the government among Chinese rural citizens may result lethal to the central government for others will see that the government is not serving their needs. More protesting will damage their image as a competent government that socially meets its citizens’ needs.
As Robert Putnam explained in Making Democracy Work (1993), ( this article evaluated the ideal of well-being in terms of institutional performance)
Instead of citizens being controlled from on high, by their governments, he is assuming that the quality of government is dependent on the quality of civic interaction at even the most informal level.
(Mary Douglas, “Traditional Culture-Let’s Hear No More About It” Culture and Publication, Rao and Walton, 106).
By this argument, it is reasonable to assume that strong social organization in rural areas will continue to place great pressure on the central government to fulfill their needs. The central government will have no other choice than to give in to demands just as it is doing now. The central government will be given extra pressure from global spectaters as well.
From an article on the bad conditions of rural living in China in BBC World News, commentators wasted no time in casting their opinion. This is what David Fields, Maseok from South Korea (formerly of the USA) had to say about his experience of life in rural China.
I just returned from three weeks in China, most of which was spent on one of its rural Islands. I was disturbed by conditions in China that were much worse than those that I had in seen in places like Nicaragua and Guatemala. We saw appalling sanitary conditions and I am not just talking about the WCs, I am talking about the tea houses where dogs and pigs freely roam looking for table scraps. We was also were the beneficiaries of a little corruption when a local party official found out we were in town. We went to China expecting to see a super power on the rise, but what he saw was a wealth gap so extreme that we could not even afford to buy items in Shanghai’s new shopping malls.
Surely, the central government will need to improve living conditions in rural areas in order to avoid such public criticism.
