“People’s delegates” out of touch with ordinary people’s lives

15 March 2011

Every year, the delegates to the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) and National People’s Congress (NPC) can be guaranteed to come up with some thought-provoking and often outlandish proposals and suggestions.

 

This year is no exception, with delegates voicing their opinions on the education of rural children, graduate unemployment and the labour shortage. And, just as predictably, many of the delegates have been criticized by netizens for making unpractical or even ridiculous proposals.

 

CPPCC delegate, Wang Ping, for example, wants to discourage children in rural areas from going to university because, she said, it’s difficult for fresh graduates to find jobs, and if these rural students fail to land good jobs in the city, they will return to poverty due to high cost of a university education.

 

Wang, who is the curator of China Ethnic Museum, made her comment in a CPPCC group discussion. She claimed that kids from the countryside are better off studying in vocational schools or high schools and then going back to countryside:

 

They don’t need to struggle in cities. We must view the countryside in a brand new perspective. An 80-year-old man in the countryside is more literate or knowledgeable than us. He will know whether it will rain or whether this year’s harvest is good, just by sitting in the field and observing the sky.
 
Also on the subject of graduate employment, NPC delegate, Liu Qingfeng, said that one of the main reasons enterprises are reluctant to hire new graduates is because they like job hopping. In order to solve this problem, he proposed amending the existing labour laws to restrict the ability of employees to change jobs, so that the staff training costs incurred by enterprises will not go to waste.

 

Obviously Liu is standing up for the management’s interest, but he forgot in today’s China, management is already overwhelmingly powerful while employees remain vulnerable. What’s more, as netizens point out, if employers fail to retain their staff after job training, it might as well indicate that the enterprise lacks prowess in human resources management.

 

As the labour shortage continues to ignite tension and worries in China’s manufacturing industries this year, Chen Weihua, NPC delegate and honorary principal of the Huazhou No.1 Middle School, came up with the idea of reducing the period of pre- university schooling from 12 to ten years, so that the supply of high school graduates or college graduates would be faster and thus benefit labour-intensive industries.

 

Chen added that if the cycle of education becomes shorter and youngsters have an earlier career start, more income tax would be collected from them, which in turn would help fund the nation’s fragile social welfare system.

 

This idea was dismissed by a Sichuan-based commentator as being about as effective as pulling up seedlings in order to help them grow. Generally speaking, labour shortages affect labour intensive industries and reflect unequal management and worker relations, where workers are discouraged from or are not even allowed to negotiate their salary and social insurance with the management. The idea of cutting school years to have a more rapid supply of workers is not only superficial but detrimental to the intellectual wellbeing of young people.

 

These and other controversial suggestions such as that to raise the price of pesticide in order to force farmers to use natural fertilizers and ensure food safety, annoy the general public because the delegates who raise them obviously know little about hardships of farmers and their families.

 

In short, these delegates fail to live up to their name of people’s representatives.

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