Beijing (AsiaNews/Agencies) – “Inflation is like a tiger” that must be tamed. It is China’s foremost problem, but the country is not in danger of a Jasmine revolution’, Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao told journalists at a press conference after today’s session of the National People’s Congress (NPC).
Inflation is the government’s top priority, Wen said. “We are confident that we can manage inflation properly,” he noted. At the start of the NPC, he acknowledged that ordinary Chinese had to cope with the problems linked to high prices and had pledged to keep inflation within the 4 per cent range. However, the price index topped expectations at 4.9 per cent in the year to February, and should keep rising.
To reduce inflation this year, China has set an official goal of 7 per cent growth per year until 2015 (not 8 per cent, as Wen had said at the start of the NPC). In recent years, growth targets have always been exceeded.
At the same time, Wen explained that China was not like Egypt or Tunisia where inflation and unemployment led to so-called ‘jasmine’ revolutions and regime change.
“Any effort to liken China to the countries in western Asia and North Africa that have experienced political turmoil is incorrect,” he insisted.
In fact, many scholars who have studied China’s problems—unemployment, poverty and corruption—have noted that the mainland is approaching a critical point. Its Gini coefficient, an income-distribution gauge used by economists, has climbed to near 0.5. The measure ranges from 0 to 1, and the 0.4 mark is used as a predictor by analysts for social unrest.
In his statement, Wen did address issues related to China’s unfettered development and high levels of corruption, which are creating a wide gap between haves and have-nots. In his view, Beijing’s model of development must be transformed and China’s system must be reformed. How that could be done, he did not say.
Back in August, Wen Jiabao spoke about the need for political reforms in a number of speeches. In them, he said without change the country’s economic development might implode. However, the texts of those speeches were removed from party newspapers. Instead, a few days ago, Wu Bangguo, chairman of the NPC standing committee, rejected calls for Western-style reforms, saying that if the Communist Party’s monopoly of power were abandoned, the country would descend into chaos.