BBC interviews Dr Zhengxu Wang on the annual National People's Congress of China

17/3/2010

Dr Zhengxu Wang, a senior research fellow at the China Policy Institute, was interviewed by the BBC on the annual session of China’s National People’s Congress on 5 March 2010. Download the interview video clip (Windows Media Player file) .

His comments were as follows:

The National People’s Congress of China, although called a “congress,” is in fact far less powerful compared with the US Congress or the British Parliament. Nevertheless, its annual sessions do serve a number of political purposes, such as unifying national opinions and projecting the future directions of the country. In this regard, this year the Premier in his report to the opening session highlighted the important achievements in coming out of the global recession. He also pointed to the important challenges the country needs to tackle, one of them being the growing income gap between different social groups and different regions. For quite a few years China has tried to shift its economic growth toward a more equitable, more environmentally friendly, and more technologically-intensive mode. The effort to reduce income inequality is but one part of this effort.

China's fiscal stimulus funds have been mainly channelled into the state sector, which does not create many jobs. The government is trying to promote the private sector and small- and medium-sized enterprises more actively, so that more jobs can be created. This effort hasn’t been very successful. 

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