Sunday 2 May 2010


IN CHINA'S FAR WEST, A BUMPY ROAD TO DEVELOPMENT
Ten years on after a massive infrastructure push to build roads and railway lines, living standards are rising in western China, a region long left out of the country's growth story and crucial to its stability. But widening inequalities and growing pressures on land are creating new anxieties in villages and small towns.

Ananth Krishnan

The Hindu, May 2, 2010

Zitong (Sichuan province):“If you want to get rich,” declares Zhang Si Cui, watching the steady stream of tractors and small trucks on the newly laid concrete road that runs right past her doorstep, “the first thing you need is a good road.”

But getting rich, and good roads, for long eluded Zitong, a small village in northern Sichuan, a province in China's far west. Farmers like Zhang, who is in her seventies, have spent much of their lives watching from the sidelines as the rest of their country, urged on by former leader Deng Xiaoping three decades ago, “got rich”.

If you draw a vertical line right through the middle of China, you will find, on either side, contrasting growth stories. Much of China's development since the economic reforms and opening up in 1978 has been driven by the booming factory-towns along the eastern coast. Prosperity has since spread inward to the fertile river deltas of the east and the south, where poverty has all but disappeared. Western China, however, is still waiting for its growth story.

A vast, barren but mineral-rich region stretching across nine provinces and administrative regions, including Sichuan, Gansu, Qinghai, Tibet and Xinjiang, western China is home to more than one-fourth of the country's 1.3 billion population. It is, also, home to more than 70 per cent of China's poor, as well as most of the country's 55 ethnic minorities. The far west has historically lagged behind the rest of the country. After three decades of growth since reforms, the disparity has only grown wider. The income gap between rural and urban areas is now the widest in the People's Republic of China's history.

(...) [artículo aquí]

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