China opens meeting on poverty gap

BEIJING -- Senior leaders of the Communist Party opened a Central Committee session yesterday focusing on ways to narrow a gap between rich and poor that has broadened dangerously in China during 25 years of sweeping market reforms.

More than 350 delegates from party organizations across the country are attending the four-day meeting, which is providing a high-level forum for a growing belief within the party that China's swift economic liberalization has left too many people behind, particularly in the countryside, where more than half of China's 1.3 billion inhabitants live.

The unbalanced growth has led to widespread dissatisfaction among farmers and laid-off workers used to socialist-era benefits that have long since disappeared. In addition, the party's alliance with private business, often accompanied by bribery, has embittered many Chinese who were taught that the party stood for social equality and helping the poor.

Increasingly, the dissatisfaction has been exploding into violent protest and rioting, becoming a threat to stability and a major concern for President Hu Jintao's government.

Hu, who is also the party leader, has largely endorsed the concerns about social equity and made them his own, calling for a ''harmonious society" with increased attention to people who have not benefited from economic liberalization.

The 25-member Politburo, which he heads as general secretary, recently listed the concerns as an important topic for the Central Committee, urging that the country ''pay more attention to social fairness."

Hu's goals -- modulating the market reforms but not abandoning them -- will probably be reflected in the 11th Five-Year Plan that will be adopted by the Central Committee as a map for social and economic development in China from 2006 through 2010, according to academic specialists with connections to the party.

The document will also serve to distinguish Hu's three-year-old leadership from that of his predecessor, Jiang Zemin, who retired a year ago from his last party post as head of the powerful Central Military Commission. Jiang presided during an era when China concentrated almost exclusively on economic growth.