By Ben Blanchard
ANKANG, China (Reuters) - Tom Tang and Dong Mijuan
represent the two opposite ends of one of China’s most glaring
social problems — the growing gap between rich and poor.
Economic reforms over the past three decades may have
lifted millions out of grinding poverty and helped fuel a
rising middle class, but those effects have not been felt
equally across the country.
When President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao came to
power five years ago, they made narrowing that gap a priority,
and it is certain to be an issue at the annual meeting of
parliament which opens on Wednesday.
The stability-obsessed government worries that if this gap
keeps growing, it will fuel social unrest and violence in the
world’s most populous nation, some 700 million of whose 1.3
billion people live in a vast and generally poor countryside.
In Ankang, a grimy city some 400 km (250 miles) south of
Xian in the northwestern province of Shaanxi, 24-year-old Tang
is one of the winners of China’s bounding economic growth,
despite his hometown’s relatively remote location.
“I feel lucky that my family has had so much success,”
Tang, recently returned from study overseas, said in very
passable English, standing outside a hotel his father’s
decoration company is fitting out.
“The rich here drive big cars and own two or three
apartments. The poor can barely keep a roof over their heads or
afford to send their children to school. The divide between the
two is more and more obvious,” he added.
Dong is at the other end of the scale. Continued…
Tags: chard, decade, family, gap, my family, rth