THERE IS a new candour in official Chinese media and political discourse about relations between the country's mounting economic difficulties and mounting civil unrest. It is shown in a survey of economists from three major urban centres in the Outlook Weeklymagazine, published by the official Xinhua news agency. But that this is still a limited response to growing public demands for greater transparency is illustrated in the call by Yan Yimang, a leading lawyer, for the Beijing government to publish full details of its annual budgets.
In a frank exchange the economists home in on two undoubted threats to China's social fabric over the coming year: the fact that seven million university graduates will have problems finding work in a shrinking labour market and the likely loss of 10 million jobs among the estimated 120-130 million workers who have migrated from poorer rural areas to the coastal regions of eastern China during the unprecedented prosperity of the last decade.
It is now expected that economic growth will fall to less than 8 per cent this year compared to its recent average of 11 to 12 per cent. Without a social security system to protect jobless workers and graduates they may turn to social protest, joining the already high number of "mass incidents" the official media report are happening against local corruption, factory closures and cuts in public budgets. According to recent reports there were 80,000 such protests last year, while 670,000 small and medium businesses have recently closed, many in the previously booming south.
It will take time for the huge $585 billion economic stimulus package announced by the government to take effect with road, railway, airport and housing construction programmes capable of absorbing displaced workers and graduates facing quite unexpected unemployment. And there is a limit to how much this can actually compensate for the loss of manufacturing exports to the United States and Europe due to the gathering global recession. China is therefore facing a major economic and social transition.
The communist party leadership is determined this will not be a political transition to a western-style democracy. It is cracking down hard on those seeking such change, including the 300 prominent lawyers, writers and academics who co-signed "Charter 08", a document criticising one-party rule and calling for a freer, more pluralist China.