China says no to one-sided pursuit of GDP growth

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Last updated at: (Beijing Time) Friday, March 05, 2004

China says no to one-sided pursuit of GDP growth

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In the past 25 years, China has created a world miraculous 8 percent GDP growth annually on average. Meanwhile, it paid a huge price in the area of social development and environmental protection. As the Chinese government advocates a scientific concept of development, which focuses on promoting and realizing human-oriented, comprehensive, coordinated and sustainable development, the development mode, which is concentrated solely on GDP growth, began to fade away from China. As Chinese premier Wen Jiabao pointed out, the scientific concept of development means that the development of urban and rural areas, regions, society, economy and the coordinated development of human and nature all proceed in tune with the domestic development and opening-up to the outside world.

Niu Wenyuan, director of the Sustainable Development Research Group and chief scientist of CAS (Chinese Academy of Sciences), said that the GDP now does not describe the real balance between nature and environment as it includes all the output, whether they are of good quality or bad, into the national wealth and takes resources and the ecological environment as free wealth. He agued that the present GDP, without taking into account resources scarcity and ecological deterioration, represents only tangible and priced labor while other labor greatly contributive to society is ignored.

He also held that a considerable part of China's GDP was achieved at the cost of the opportunities for the next generation.

Data show that China's economy had experienced rapid growth in the 15 years from 1985 to 2000 when its GDP rose by 8.7 percent annually on average. However, if the loss of cost and ecological deficit, i.e., the imaginary part of nature and human, was deducted, China's real national wealth accounted for only 78.2 percent of China's nominal wealth. This means China's GDP only increased by 6.5 percent annually in this period.

"China is a massive economy growing at an amazing rate. If the present high-consumption and high-pollution growth mode is not changed, China will lack sufficient resources and environmental capacity to sustain its future development", said Pan Yue, deputy director-general of the State Environmental Protection Administration.

Niu Wenyuan holds that China's per-capita resources are limited and its ecological environment endowment is fragile. The extensive, expanding mode of economic growth featuring high consumption, high pollution and low returns, prevalent in China for 20 years, had made such problem as energy waste and heavily damaged environment increasingly prominent.

Niu said that the amount of energy consumed for the creation of 1 US dollar-worth product in China is 4.3 times higher than in the US, 7.7 times in Germany and France and 11.5 times in Japan��

Ma Kai, chairman of China National Development and Reform Commission, declared recently that China was considering slowing down its GDP growth and working hard to seek social progress in a scientific way.

Pan Yue revealed that his institution is trying to incorporate the environmental index into the comprehensive evaluation system for the performance of local government officials. The scientific concept of development put forward by the CPC demonstrates that the Chinese government will no longer take GDP as the only criterion for judging development. Instead, environment, resources and social progress will all be taken into consideration.

Guangdong Province, which hit an eight-year high in its GDP growth last year and has entered into another phase of fast expansion, has lowered this year's anticipated GDP growth to 9 percent, a sharp decline of 4.6 percentage points compared with that of last year. A few other areas, such as Beijing and Zhejiang, are also considering incorporating "green GDP" which debits environmental losses into their economic statistics system. Shenzhen will stop assessing government officials with GDP growth while paying more attention to problems such as resources consumption, social fairness and human development arising in its economic development. Chen Shanru, director of Guangdong Development and Reform Committee, said that a lowered GDP would help to guide various departments to place emphasis of their economic development on deepening reform, pushing forward structural adjustment and improving the quality and efficiency of economic growth, so as to avoid one-sided pursuit of growth rates.

The new development concept is doubtlessly exerting a strong impact on Chinese government officials at various levels. Jiao Yuejin, secretary of the CPC Qixian County Committee, Henan Province, said, "Shifting our attention from mere concern for GDP to a broader vision of development helps the government place more financial and material resources on social development and strengthen the weak links to promote the coordinated economic and social development."

The "two sessions" (the NPC and CPPCC sessions) this year will not crave for anticipated GDP growth rate.

Source: People's Daily Online

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