Lesson 23

bsp;             1. Breaking the "Iron Rice Bowl"

    In his effort to repair the damage of 30 lost years,Deng Xiaoping is abolishing what is called the "iron rice bowl" or "big-pot system", which guaranteed that workers and peasants shared equal rewards regardless of their contribution. In its place, he has introduced "production responsibility", which links remuneration to individual effort.

    The dramatic impact of these reforms is most evident in rural China, home to more than 80 percent of the country's 1.1 billion people. A visit to a township outside Wuxi tells the story. The commune there, like most throughout China, has been dismantled. Instead of being assigned to jobs by a team leader and drawing equal shares from a common revenue pool as in the gast, the peasants contract to work a piece of land and to deLiver a quota of products to the state at a fixed price.
What they produce above the quota they may keep for their own consumption or sel.l in a free market. They also are encouraged to caltivate bigger private plots and to engage in what are known as "sideline activities" to augment their incomes. The result is that the average household income has increased from about $ 225 a year to $ 350--$400. The most enterprising can earn many times that sum.

    Lauded in the Chinese press as a model for all to follow is the chicken farmer who went into the egg business and amassed a fortune sufficient to enable her to buy China's first privately owned car, as well as two trucks for her enterprise.
    Everywhere the evidence of rising affluence - in Chinese terms-- is visible. In one town I visited, where hardly a new house had been built for 30 years, nearly 90 percent of the families have now moved into new accommodations. Most homes have radio-cassette players, and a majority have television sets acquired in the past year or so. Less than five years ago, such luxuries were unavailable.

    In Nanjing, once the capital of the kouomintang government, a visitor sees another.aspect of the personal incentive system. Business booms in a free market of hundreds of .individually operated stalls lining several narrow streets. On sale are vegetables, fruits, chickens and live fish and eels. Buyers are many. Peasant merchants charge what the market will bear and keep what money they get.
    Are Communist leaders worried that all of this will lead to the emergence
of a new class of rich peasants'? They insist they are not. "Some peasants prosper early, others will prosper later," says one official. I7eng puts it as a trickle-down theory: "Make some people rich first s0 as to lead all people to wealth."

　

                      2. How It Feels to Be Out of Job

    Xu Peihua, 26, was fired from her job at the Shanghai No 5 Silk Knitting Factory in january 1987 after she became ill.
    The community committce where Xu lived was supposed to compensate her for 70 per cent of her medical expenses for one year after she left the factory. But after a year, her illness got worse.
    A Shanghai hospital refused Co take her in unless she paid a deposit of 10,000 yuan. After much negotiation with the hospital, she was taken in, after paying 5,000 yuan deposit.

    Her problems were not over. Her unemployment insurance expired and so she no longer received her 40-yuan monthly pension.She had nowhere to go to get compensation for her hospital fees. Xu needed money urgently, but no institutions would help.
    Xu's former employer, the Shanghai No 5 Silk Knitting Factory, said that their responsibility for her ended once she was fired. So they refused to give a penny.
    The Shanghai Labour Service Company, which has an unemployment pension fund of 20 million yuan at its disposal, could not help with the medical bills because Xu was no longer eligible for a pension.

    Neither could she receive assistance from the Shanghai Municipal Bureau of Civil Affairs. Their welfare coverage extends to divorced people, single seniors, homeless youngsters, relatives of martyrs and soldiers in service, and disabled people. Xu did not fall into any of these categories, so she did not qualify.
    But not all jobless people share Xu's fate. A window may shut, but a door may open. A number of unemployed people have made a successful transition from "iron rice bowl" to working on their own or for private business.

    Li Chunying of t.he Shenyang Steel Pipes Factory was one of the few university graduates who lost her job. She had only worked th

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