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The hardest question to answer in China is whether slower economic growth and continued inflation could lead to more social tensions, which in turn could damage the economy through weaker investment and more cautious spending.
Though blue-collar wages have surged over the last decade, tripling in some coastal provinces, the salaries for many white-collar workers, particularly recent college graduates, have been trailing inflation.
The central government banned local taxes and fees in rural areas six years ago. And it has been talking for years about whether to start assessing property taxes instead; so far it has experimented with that approach in only a few cities, notably Chongqing and Shanghai. Without a broad base of property taxes, local governments across China raise much of their money by seizing land from peasants with minimal compensation based on the value of recent harvests, rezoning it for industrial or commercial use and then selling the land for far more to developers.
Roy Prosterman, the founder and chairman emeritus of Landesa, a rural development policy group based in Seattle, said in a speech in Hong Kong on Thursday that the group’s surveys in China had found that peasants typically receive only one-fifteenth of what developers pay for land in these deals.
The news media have reported a spate of protests in recent months in rural areas, including riots this week in the southern province of Guangdong. But protests have erupted periodically for years and there are no reliable national statistics on whether the overall number of protests is rising or falling.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/24/business/global/chinas-economic-engine-shows-signs-of-slowing.html
The hardest question to answer in China is whether slower economic growth and continued inflation could lead to more social tensions, which in turn could damage the economy through weaker investment and more cautious spending.
Though blue-collar wages have surged over the last decade, tripling in some coastal provinces, the salaries for many white-collar workers, particularly recent college graduates, have been trailing inflation.
The central government banned local taxes and fees in rural areas six years ago. And it has been talking for years about whether to start assessing property taxes instead; so far it has experimented with that approach in only a few cities, notably Chongqing and Shanghai. Without a broad base of property taxes, local governments across China raise much of their money by seizing land from peasants with minimal compensation based on the value of recent harvests, rezoning it for industrial or commercial use and then selling the land for far more to developers.
Roy Prosterman, the founder and chairman emeritus of Landesa, a rural development policy group based in Seattle, said in a speech in Hong Kong on Thursday that the group’s surveys in China had found that peasants typically receive only one-fifteenth of what developers pay for land in these deals.
The news media have reported a spate of protests in recent months in rural areas, including riots this week in the southern province of Guangdong. But protests have erupted periodically for years and there are no reliable national statistics on whether the overall number of protests is rising or falling.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/24/business/global/chinas-economic-engine-shows-signs-of-slowing.html
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