China becomes a force to
be reckoned with in 2003
By Robert J. Saiget, Agence France-Presse
China proved a force to be reckoned with in 2003, putting a man in space, beefing up its presence on the international stage and maintaining a booming economy, all while undergoing a smooth leadership transition.
China’s economic juggernaut powered its way through the year, posting an expected 8.5-percent growth rate despite the outbreak of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, which rattled the country and brought the travel and tourism industry to a grinding halt.
Despite a failure to address the epidemic in the early months, the new leadership headed by President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao roused the nation into a Maoist-type “People’s War” campaign and by June the World Health Organization announced that the outbreak was contained.
China’s concerted action to stem sars, which killed 349 people, not only won praise on the international stage, but was seen as another victory for the nation’s rigid communist system which has allowed the government a wide range of extraordinary powers.
Besides success with sars, Beijing was applauded internationally for its efforts to broker the six-nation talks on ending the North Korean nuclear threat and for its support in the global war on terror.
It also won plaudits for becoming only the third country to put a man in space with the successful flight in October of the Shenzhou V with astronaut Yang Liwei onboard.
The mission, 42 years after the United States and the former Soviet Union achieved the feat, was largely seen as a symbolic effort at boosting nationalism and the image of the ruling party, but was also touted as invigorating Chinese masses with science and technology.
With a huge population, which places enormous pressure on nearly every aspect of life here, including the environment and food security, the mission also had practical purposes.
It carried imaging equipment aimed at assessing the loss of Chinese cropland to expanding cities, while an experiment with seeds tested the effect that weightlessness in space could have on increased crop yields.
Like its space achievements, China’s economy, driven by rising domestic demand and consumption and boosted by fiscal pump priming and robust foreign investment and trade, became the envy of the world.
By November, however, Beijing issued plans to address economic overheating in 2004, while vowing to prioritize policies aimed at bridging an ever-widening gap between an increasingly rich urban upper middle class and a growing army of laid off workers and some 700 million farmers.
In speeches late in the year, both Hu and Wen made it clear that improving the lot of disenfranchised workers and impoverished farmers would be central to government work in 2004.
With China’s rigid political system stacked with key protégés of retired president and party boss Jiang Zemin, Jiang’s long-time mantra of maintaining social and political stability appeared as the criteria by which the Hu-Wen government, ushered in at the 10th National People’s Congress in March, was being assessed.
To this end, the party made it abundantly clear that maintaining robust economic growth is the only way to address both unemployment and rural unrest.
With another round of restructuring at state-owned enterprises set to lay off even more workers, government officials continued to insist they could only meet the target of creating eight million urban jobs a year by maintaining annual economic growth at or above seven percent.
Meanwhile, to keep the party in line and to fight off political challenges, Hu and Wen revealed an uncanny ability to remove incompetent and corrupt politicians as they oversaw the unprecedented removal of five ministerial-level officials and a slew of once prominent local cadres.
China still faces huge developmental problems.
With up to 140 million migrant workers roaming the country, the government in 2003 further acknowledged that urbanization was an unstoppable trend as residential registration procedures were simplified and draconian police powers to detain and repatriate jobless vagrants eliminated.
While worker unrest in urban areas became increasingly routine in 2003, social instability in rural areas was manifested in a high suicide rate and growing crime, including a spate of shocking serial murders and kidnappings.
In one such case a man allegedly bicycled through rural villages killing and then robbing some 67 people.
In Southern China, a spate of human trafficking trials were held, including one involving a gang accused of trying to sell 118 newborn babies.
China also witnessed its fair share of natural disasters, which led to the deaths of 2,145 people.
Many of the casualties came from torrential rains and flooding during the summer months, while earthquakes, especially in the northwest, were also serious, with one in Xinjiang leaving 260 people dead and thousands more injured.
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