Word: sichuan
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...press conferences - that their program would offer significant benefits for the country's consumers and corporations. Zhang Ping, head of the National Development and Reform Commission, outlined an infrastructure-heavy program that includes $219 billion for roads, railways and other transportation, $146 billion for recovery from disasters including the Sichuan earthquake, $58 billion for improving housing for the poor, $54 billion for rural development programs, $54 billion to boosting technology and innovation at Chinese corporations and $30 billion for energy saving and anti-pollution measures. Health care will get $22 billion, less than 5% of the total...
...Consider: almost half of China's $585 billion economic-stimulus program, announced last November to much fanfare, is earmarked for infrastructure spending on railroads, highways and power grids. Another 25% will go to reconstruct entire towns in Sichuan province that were devastated by last year's earthquake. These are "shovel-ready" infrastructure projects, and financial markets rallied on March 4 partly due to expectations - unfounded, as it turned out - that Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao would unveil a second round of stimulus measures on March 5 during the opening of China's annual National Party Congress in Beijing. (See pictures from...
...Beijing spends only 5% of GDP on health care, pensions, unemployment benefits and other social services. (U.S. social-welfare spending as a percentage of GDP is about 20%.) That is a depressingly low figure, even for a relatively poor developing country. I recently interviewed a migrant worker from Sichuan province who several months ago broke his arm in an industrial accident. He's back home now, without a job, without unemployment benefits, and has no access to health care to treat his arm, which still pains him "to the point that I can't work," he told...
...Tibetan exile groups are already reporting that 15 protesters have been arrested in recent days in the Tibetan-dominated town of Litang in Sichuan province. Chinese authorities have apparently decided that all Tibetan areas of China are now out of bounds to foreigners until at least April. This, combined with Beijing's decision to keep out all but a handful of closely escorted foreign reporters (TIME's applications to visit Lhasa have been repeatedly refused) out of Tibet since the protests last March, means that ethnically Tibetan areas of China are now effectively sealed off from the world. (Read TIME...
...pictures of China's Sichuan Quake: Six Months Later...