By Fu Jing (China Daily)
Updated: 2008-03-06 15:27

China has entered an era when "industries should subsidize agriculture and cities should help rural regions". Though this government declaration came during Premier Wen Jiabao's tenure, in 2006, he has to give part of the credit for it to his predecessor Zhu Rongji.

Amid the widening rural-urban income gap and sluggish harvest in 2003, Zhu suggested in his last Government Work Report that the government try every means possible to give farmers a better life. Wen picked it up from there to take the concept further.

But that's not the only thing Wen and his colleagues in the State Council, the country's cabinet, have done for farmers and rural areas in the past five years. They have scrapped agriculture tax, which had been there for more than 2,600 years, offered nine-year free compulsory education to rural children and spent billions of dollars to build roads, hospitals and schools in the countryside, where about 55 percent of the country's people still live.

Last year alone, the cabinet allocated 420 billion yuan ($60 billion) from the government treasury for rural development. The sum almost equals the total amount Zhu spent on rural areas from 1998 to 2003. But to be fair, the government's tax revenue and income from other sources has risen greatly from the years when Zhu was premier. Also, Zhu had two equally big problems to deal with: the Asian financial crisis and restructuring of State-owned enterprises.

"The central government's expenditure in and focus on the rural areas are impressive and preliminary achievements are satisfactory," says senior researcher with the Ministry of Agriculture Jiang Zhongyi. The government's efforts on this front have borne results, with the total grain yield staying above the 2004 level, and reaching a record high of 500 million tons last year. Farmer's income, too, has accelerated, with the year-on-year rate reaching 9.5 percent in 2007 and per capita income touching 4,100 yuan ($560).

Wen has been leading not only from his office desk, but also from the front. He is the vanguard, in the true sense of the term. Take the heavy snow that wreaked havoc across central, east and south China before and during Spring Festival. He was out on streets with those stranded, down in coal mines with miners, aboard trains with harried passengers, inside factories with migrant workers, on planes flying to areas hit hardest by the worst winter in 50 years and on roads with people clearing the ice and slush and the debris left behind by snowstorms. He listened to migrant workers' complaints and ordered employers to pay them their rightful dues. He restored calm among those desperate to return home for that all-important Lunar New Year's Eve dinner with the family. He thanked the tens of thousands who worked courageously to make the lives of millions of others better.

"The changes in recent years have been impressive," says Guo Hongmei. But she wants the government to maintain the development momentum in rural areas. "The most important thing is a stable pro-farmer policy," says the 35-year-old National People's Congress (NPC) deputy from Tongjiang, a poor county in Sichuan province - in fact, it's among the country's 500 most poor areas.

Perhaps that is the reason why Wen visited Tongjiang, first in 2001 and then in 2005. From his firsthand experience, he surmised that farmers in such counties face four major problems: lack of proper road links, poor education, poor healthcare and shortage of drinking water.

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