ChinaWatch: Land Of Opportunity

Welcome to ChinaWatch, WMB’s digest of news from the country with the world’s second largest economy and our chief rival to global dominance.


Fat Growth Forecast

China is on course for another five years of robust growth, but inflation threatens social stability and must be tamed, Premier Wen Jiabao says.

Wen, in China's version of a “State of the Union ’’ address to the annual parliamentary session, says the top priority this year is to curb price rises hurting ordinary people in the world's second-largest economy, Reuters reports.

Laying out a plan for the next five years, Wen says the drivers of China's meteoric economic rise remain firm.

“There is huge potential demand in the market, the supply of funds is ample, the overall scientific and educational level of the people is rising,” Wen says in his report to the National People's Congress .

He vows to boost spending on education, health care and public housing, initiatives intended to narrow the chasm between the rich and poor in China that has stirred resentment.

A huge police presence in the capital and a rare public warning against protests underscored the government's sensitivity to even the faintest whiff that the unrest roiling the Middle East could spread to China.

Building a fairer society has been a core goal of Wen's premiership, but the income gap has widened during his eight years in power and he is trying to lay the groundwork for improvement before a leadership reshuffle in late 2012.

“As Deng Xiaoping said, the first step is to make a part of the people rich and the next step is to make everyone rich,” says Shen Jianguang, economist with Mizuho Securities, referring to the Chinese leader who launched market reforms in the late 1970s.

They’re Too Busy

With single young men at the heart of Arab world revolt, China might seem a country ripe for uprising. But while it’s got millions of single young men, they don’t appear interested in amassing a movement for change.

China now has at least 20 million young men with no chance of ever finding a female partner, according to population experts. In short, there are too many men.

Demographers predict the gender gap will grow to 35 million by 2020.

The reason: China’s one-child policy and a culturally ingrained preference for male children, along with a rise in accessible ultrasound technology and sex-selective abortion, led to a staggering surplus of young men born in the 1980s and 1990s.

The overall trend is beginning to change for new families, but there remains a bubble of young men that can’t be reversed or repaired. So why aren’t they rising up and causing trouble for the authoritarian regime of China? In short, they’re too busy.

Andrea den Boer, co-author of the 2005 book “Bare Branches,” an in-depth investigation of surplus males and related potential security issues in Asia, says China’s situation is different than that of Egypt, which suffers from what is know as a “youth bulge.”

China has the millions of single young men, but what it’s missing is massive unemployment and economic decline. With the world’s fastest-growing large economy, opportunity is abundant.

Development has reached every corner of the country and work opportunities have begun taking tens of thousands of young Chinese men to Africa and other parts of the world.

ChinaWatch