By John Schauble
March 24, 2000
Despite its economic reforms, China faces the spectre of declining living standards, especially in remote areas, with around 200 million - or one in six Chinese - living in absolute poverty, Australia's new ambassador in Beijing told a seminar of aid workers yesterday.
While there had been significant progress in alleviating poverty over the past two decades, "the task ahead is still a huge one for China", Mr David Irvine said. He said average rises in living standards in China "masked significant and possibly growing disparities" between rural and urban Chinese, those in wealthy eastern areas and the less developed western provinces and between men and women.
"The actual pace of poverty alleviation has slowed in recent years," Mr Irvine said. Mr Wang Xingong, a senior bureaucrat in China's Ministry of Foreign Trade and Economic Cooperation, conceded that globalisation had brought about "arduous challenges to the structural reform of the Chinese economy", which were affecting the delivery of aid programs. He said these programs now had to be integrated and work across a range of issues such as health, environmental protection and education.
Australia spends $55 million on aid to China, making it the country's fifth largest program aid donor. While most of this money is spent on development projects in health, rural development and education, about $16 million is given as emergency relief - mostly as food aid.
A senior AusAID official based in Canberra, Mr Scott Dawson, told the seminar that bilateral project assistance to China has almost doubled in the past two years. Many projects reflected the enormous pressure on China's environment wrought by increasing economic development, he said. Much of Australia's aid effort is directed to the poorer and more remote areas of western China, including Tibet and Inner Mongolia, and is delivered in partnership with the United Nations, Chinese and other agencies.
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