Rome (AsiaNews) - Now or never: the National People's Congress that opens tomorrow in Beijing is perhaps the last chance for the leadership of Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao to leave a mark on the history of the country. And this for two reasons: first, the most important theme of the NPC this year is the approval of the 2011-2015 five-year plan that sets out the economic prospects of China's development, and second, next year will see the changing towards the fifth generation of leadership with the resignation of Hu and Wen.

Key elements of this five-year plan emerged during the plenum of the Communist Party last October. Then Hu had spoken of "inclusive growth" to emphasize the need for greater distribution of wealth, and he had also reaffirmed the leadership of the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) as "the fundamental guarantee to achieve the goals of economic and social development."

In fact, since 2002 - under the leadership of Hu and Wen - China has moved from sixth to second world economy, but the "inclusive growth" has been disproved. According to Chinese trade unions, workers' wages in 1983, were 53% of GDP, in 2005 they are only 36.7. In contrast, from 1978 to 2005, the proportion of GDP gains of entrepreneurs increased by 20%, bringing the current abyss between rich and poor in China, which is similar only to the worst African countries.

The difference between rich and poor fuels social tension. A survey by the Academy of Social Sciences shows that over 70% of Chinese believe that inequalities between rich and poor are the crucial problem of the country, which leads to "hatred towards the rich," because this wealth is often accumulated through illicit means. With the addition of pollution, kidnapping, corruption of Party members, it is easy to understand why social unrest has also grown in China. In 1993, the beginning of the acceleration of economic reforms, there were 8 000 "mass incidents", for some years now that figure is around 100 000 per year.

On 26 February, Wen Jiabao, who took part in an online chat for two hours, promised swift action to curb inflation, social inequalities, corruption of public officials. For this reason, he thinks that this year China's GDP growth will be only 7.5% and not - as was the case for almost 20 years - 10%. This will lead to transforming the development model: strengthening domestic consumption, increasing wages, curbing pollution, reducing taxes for low income groups, increasing those for high-income groups.

But Wen’s lyrical and tearful sermons of a development more focused on the welfare of the people, need to face a fact: those who should be making decisions in favour of the people are the very ones that caused the gap between rich and poor and have made China the most polluted country on earth, namely, entrepreneurs and "princes" (sons of the high ranking members of the CCP), who thus far preferred to take unbridled advantage of the population and territory. According to Bloomberg, the NPC, the 70 richest members (about 3 000 members) together possess more than 493 billion Yuan (54 billion euro). By comparison, the 70 richest of the US Houses possess 4.8 billion U.S. dollars (about 3.43 billion euro).

And yet the National Peoples Congress will be somewhat forced to take steps to redistribute wealth. Not least because the Chinese model of development based on exports, is now in crisis due to global recession. Overproduction that bloats the Chinese stores in need of a growing internal market and therefore an improvement in spending capacity of the working population.

The other element that points to change is the "jasmine revolution" and changes in Tunisia and Egypt. The social problems which gave rise to the revolts (cost of living, unemployment, corruption, dictatorship, ...) are similar if not identical to those of China. For weeks the government has curbed the news about these countries, obscured sites and blogs, arresting dissidents, stopping – and beating up – both Chinese and foreign journalists to prevent asimilar fate to that of Ben Ali and Mubarak for the leadership of the CCP .

The "jasmine revolution" includes demands for greater democracy. Wen Jiabao also dared to speak about this a few months ago (14.10.2010 Party members call for an end to press censorship, backing Wen Jiabao), but his speeches were censored.