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Strategies & Market Trends : China Warehouse- More Than Crockery -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: RealMuLan who wrote (1388)	11/12/2003 1:48:27 PM
From: RealMuLan	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 6370

Thanks to Zhu RongJi - China's rural poor worse off than two decades ago November 12, 2003 By AFP Beijing - Farmers living in some rural parts of China are much worse off today than their counterparts 25 years ago despite the government's economic reforms, a leading expert on rural China said Wednesday. Edward Friedman, a professor specializing in Chinese politics at the University of Wisconsin in the United States, just completed a two-week field study of 10 villages in mountainous areas in southwest China's Yunnan province and said he was struck by the level of extreme poverty. "My experience of having been in poor parts of Hebei plains (in northern China) 25 years ago was that these people were much poorer than the people I saw in the Hebei flatlands 25 years ago before reform began," Friedman told reporters. "When I say poor villages, I was in villages where (in) the elementary, primary schools, people used rocks to write on rocks in school. I thought these people were far worse off than I saw 25 years ago." Friedman's trip, conducted in late October and early November, took him to a poor mountainous area of Yunnan province inhabited by about four million people, mostly Tibetans. Despite the past two decades of economic reforms which enabled China's economy to grow by an average of 10 percent annually, Friedman said he found farmers in Yunnan had benefited little from the progress. In particular, he countered claims by Chinese officials that Tibetans were making lots of money from tourists who wanted to see Tibetan songs and dances. "It sure as heck wasn't my experience in Tibetan areas of Yunnan," Friedman said. "What I experienced rather was that these are people who have been beaten down over a long period of time. They have no self-confidence. Many of them above the age of 20 are illiterate," Friedman said. Contrary to the mass migration of people from other rural parts of China to the cities, very few of the Tibetans in Yunnan were leaving, which meant very little outside income was coming in to supplement their meager living from farming. "They're afraid to go to the cities ... these people earn very little money from getting off-farm labor," Friedman said. - AFP busrep.co.za