Cai Qihua, director of the Changjiang (Yangtze) Water Resources Commission and a delegate to the National People’s Congress, has called on the government to pay more attention to the safety of areas below the Three Gorges dam, and to invest more money in related research. . Ms. Cai told the recent NPC meeting that the Three Gorges project has played an important role in providing electricity and controlling floods in the downstream region.

“But I’d like to talk about the silt in the Three Gorges reservoir,” Ms. Cai said. [Full text]

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Post tags: NPC 2007, rivers, Three Gorges Dam
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The debate at the National People’s Congress (NPC), China’s highest legislative body, over the country’s first private property law spilled over into the public sphere at the NPC’s annual meeting which ended on March 16, exposing internal debates around the opposing forces of capitalism and communism.

And, despite the fact that China’s leaders are paying increased attention to the social and economic divides between the rural, inland provinces and the booming, coastal cities the fact is that the rural-urban divide is likely to continue to worsen. Much of the legislation passed will benefit the upper and middle classes in the cities far more than the poor rural areas. [Full Text]

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In the memory of CNN’s China correspondent Jaime CruzFlor [sic], it was a major heavy-weight report in the 1980′s for the China-based foreign media to be able to say that the “two Congresses will begin on such a day during such a month.” That is because “no one ever told us when the meetings start and never mind the subjects of those meetings, because we had to guess everything.” Therefore, when the two national congresses became open to the foreign media for the first time, CruzFlor could “not even imagine it.”

Eighteen years later, CruzFlor is still reporting on the two Congresses in China. But this year, he is paying more attention to education, medical care, inequality of wealth and other issues.

Including CruzFlor, a total of 560 reporters from 135 foreign media outlets gathered news at the two Congresses this year. For the same time, they saw the English-language versions of the standing committee work reports as well as draft laws. Also for the first time, they can look up directly from the web pages of the “news center for the two Congresses” the names and addresses of the various representative groups and their contact telephone numbers. [Full text]

(Note: The foreign correspondent referred to above is CNN’s Jaime FlorCruz.)

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Post tags: China coverage, foreign correspondents, NPC 2007
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Increasingly squeezed between the demands of the right and the criticisms of the left, the CCP is engaged in an ever more delicate juggling act, balancing the interests of the urban middle class, who have emerged as a key constituency of support, and a restive peasantry, once the party’s mainstay but progressively disaffected at being left behind by the economic boom in the cities.

China’s unique form of “socialism with Chinese characteristics” is rent with contradictions, and many of these are forcibly coming to the fore. The recently concluded annual session of China’s parliament, the National People’s Congress (NPC), usually a sedate piece of set political theater, was thus the site of some unusually feisty debate this year. [Full text]

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Post tags: NPC 2007, property law, social unrest, wealth gap
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From The China Blog – TIME:

I forgot to post this from the just-finished National People’s Congress, or rather from Premier Wen Jiabao’s Press Conference afterwards. A pretty impressive turn out, I thought, though the guy next to me said he was there reporting for the Inner Mongolian Yurt Builders Weekly…or was it the Hothot Times?

Anyway, it struck me strongly that the question Wen spent the most time on was about democratic reform, a follow up on an article he wrote in the People’s Daily in February in which he appeared to suggest that it would be a century before China was ready for democracy. [Full Text]

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The following is the full text of the Report on the Implementation of the 2006 Plan for National Economic and Social Development and on the 2007 Draft Plan for National Economic and Social Development, which was submitted on March 5 for review by the Fifth Session of the Tenth National People’s Congress:

……Total government revenue for 2006 was 3.93 trillion yuan, an increase of 24.3%. Large industrial enterprises generated 1.8784 trillion yuan in profits, up 31%. Energy consumption per unit of GDP fell by 1.23%, which is the first drop since 2003. Water consumption per unit of the added value of industry dropped by 9%. [Full Text]

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One of the main achievements of the fifth session of the Tenth Chinese National People’s Congress (NPC) was the adoption of a property law that finally guarantees Chinese citizens the right to own private property. Three years ago, the NPC introduced amendments to the Chinese constitution that recognized private property, but the government’s position on the matter was not spelled out in detail. In total, the legislation has taken 13 years to prepare, and it was passed by the NPC last week after six previous attempts had failed. Many experts consider the 247-article document to be key to China’s eventual economic transition from socialism to capitalism. This view was confirmed by Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao, who declared that the NPC’s decision will help China “create an open and honest market system.”

In practice, however, the law will defend the interests only of city residents and does not guarantee peasants ownership of their land. To placate rural residents and avert a possible eruption of growing tensions between the country’s 400 million urbanites and 800 million peasants, many of whom live in grinding poverty, Beijing has decided to increase spending on the countryside to $51 billion in 2007, and residents of rural areas will presumably receive the lion’s share of the $38 billion that the government has earmarked for education and social spending. A clear example of the kind of social upheaval that Beijing wishes to avoid took place last week in the town of Zhushan in the country’s southern Hunan Province, where 20,000 people, mostly farmers, took to the streets to protest a doubling of bus fare over the Chinese New Year holiday, a popular time for travel. The authorities deployed riot police and the military to break up the demonstrations and to stop the crowd from storming the regional administration building, and in the clashes that followed dozens of people were wounded and at least one student was killed. [Full Text]

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Post tags: economic growth, NPC 2007, socialism
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Reporter: You have just mentioned that various governing systems are coming into being, and at the same time many problems are just showing up. As the Party Secretary of the (Jilin) Province, do you welcome the supervision from the press?

Wang Min: The supervision of the press is an effective way to ensure that the party committee and the government will make correct decisions and conduct scientific governance. The effect is becoming more and more noticeable. But I don’t welcome excessive negative media coverage. Generally speaking, excessive negative coverage will create a negative feeling among the people. It’s very detrimental. I think the press should have a broad perspective and be politically correct. It should be responsible for the party, the government and the society. The press can’t blindly insist on being eye-catching. It should do more support and encouragement. When I was in charge of education, once I said that good kids are cultivated by praise. If everybody praises you, you will slowly have very good self-discipline. I haven’t been in charge of propaganda, but I think doing propaganda is just like educating kids, and good behavior is created by praise. [Full Interview in Chinese]

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China is on the road to democracy, but not necessarily to Western-style democracy, China’s premier said Friday, citing the country’s unique concerns and the challenge of operating within a socialist framework.

During a rare two-hour meeting with journalists in the cavernous Great Hall of the People, Wen Jiabao delivered a series of messages meant to reassure constituencies inside and outside the country.

One was that the world should not be afraid of China’s growing defense spending despite a missile test that destroyed an aging Chinese weather satellite. He also said China wants to reduce its trade surplus, and he sought to assure Washington that Beijing’s overseas investments would not destabilize the dollar.[Full Text]

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Post tags: NPC 2007, political reform
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Of all the steps that China has taken away from its Communist past since reforms began nearly 30 years ago, few have boasted the symbolic power of the law that parliament is due to pass next Friday.

The Property Law, for the first time since the 1949 Chinese revolution, offers comprehensive legal protection to private property. Quite a move from a ruling party whose name literally means “The China Collective Property Party.”

It couches that protection, though, in language that often seems more solicitous of state property – a sign of the subject’s sensitivity. “This is a very loaded text politically,” says one Western diplomat. “It says a lot about the current balance and trends of the regime.”[Full Text]

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