Income gap rings alarm

http://china.globaltimes.cn/society/2010-05/535803.html

A plan to curb the yawning wealth distribution will be drafted, according to officials with the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) who declined to give a timetable. The efforts come as experts warn that the nation can ill-afford a growing disparity in earnings.

Such a plan could be written into the country’s next Five- Year Plan for 2011-15, according to the 21st Century Business Herald newspaper.

State media outlets have featured intensive coverage on the issue, with the latest report appearing Tuesday in the overseas edition of People’s Daily, which commented that China is faced with a growing income gap and an accompanying sense of social inequality despite a steady growth since the 1980s in the national average salary.

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Yang Yiyong, director of the Social Development Research Department at the NDRC, warned that China can't afford any further rises in the Gini Index, as growing disparity could result in social unrest and "could even cause distrust in the country's public-ownership economic system."

"Social problems, including migrant workers consecutively taking their lives and serial attacks on schoolchildren, are related to conflicts stemming from the income gap," Yang said.

Yang's words referred to seven unrelated attacks on primary school and kindergarten students in less than two months, in which more than a dozen children were killed. Also this week, the number of apparent suicides at Taiwanese company Foxconn hit 10.

The rural-urban income gap constituted a major part in the overall gap, Yang said, urging the free mobilization of labor and the implementation of equal pay for equal work, both of which are hindered by the current household registration system, or hukou.

People's Daily reported that the existing hukou system has helped push up the gap between the rich and poor.

Citizens with rural hukou cannot generally enjoy the same social benefits as urban residents, even though they live and work in cities.