Most observers - including the world's major investment services and some Western journals which used to pour scorn on China's development performance - agree that the mainland's GDP growth will continue to be above 7 per cent in 2003.

In fact, continuing to bicker about China's growth rate, or how much of it is for real, is meaningless. China's high growth record has been consistent for a good part of the last two and a half decades - all the new buildings and bustling restaurants in mainland cities provide ample footnotes.

Chinese observers view the growth issue from a different perspective: While they are encouraged to see the engine of the economy running at such a roaring speed, they are also quick to point out that it's not because anyone in China wants the economy to grow so fast, but that the economy simply cannot afford a slowdown.

Put simply, the fast growth is a good thing, of course, but the factors driving such fast growth include some truly worrisome ones. The greatest concern is jobs, according to such leading scholars as Wang Jian, of the China Macro-Economics Network, and Li Peilin, of the Institute of Sociology at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.

Imbalance in progress

Talking about 2003's growth would require to begin from a review of 2002 performance.

Although the official 2002 statistics are still to be published, sources with the State Statistical Bureau say China's GDP must have exceeded 10,200 billion yuan (US$1,228 billion).

As the central government is busy preparing for the opening of the National People's Congress annual session, key provincial-level statistical reports are being delivered to Beijing - shedding additional light on the performance of key regions.

Three provinces - namely Guangdong, Jiangsu and Shandong - managed to raise the GDP record of each to higher than 1,000 billion yuan (US$120 billion). In other words, they represented 30 per cent of the nation's economy.

The coastal, export-oriented Zhejiang Province was perhaps the fourth largest regional economy, contributing some 700 billion yuan (US$85 billion) to the national GDP sum.

As for the key cities, Shanghai's GDP was over 500 billion yuan (US$60 billion), while Beijing's was just a little above 300 billion yuan (US$36 billion).

Local officials may get excited by such figures. But they are hardly great news if viewed against the national background: If lumped together, the above four provinces and two cities would represent 45 per cent of the mainland economy. Except Beijing, all of them are on the country's coastline. What about the rest of the country? A regional imbalance is obvious.

Shaanxi Province, for instance, could only generate some 200 billion yuan (US$24 billion) - although it has Xi'an, the largest city in northwestern China, and the 2,000-year old Qin Empire's legion of terra cotta soldiers that attract millions of foreign tourists every year.

Further westward, sharing China's borderline with Afghanistan and once plagued by Al Queda-backed bombing attacks, the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region saw its GDP trail at the 100 billion yuan (US$12 billion) level. The GDP of Tibet was only some 10 billion yuan (US$1.2 billion).

Imbalance can be seen even within wealthy provinces. In Guangdong, for example, nearly half of its GDP came from Guangzhou and Shenzhen. A similar case is Jiangsu, where two cities, namely Suzhou and Wuxi, provided 35 per cent of its economy.

In comparison with the industrial pattern of half a century ago, when the central government almost depended on just a single city - Shanghai - for industrial productivity and tax revenues, the nation's modern economic base has become more evenly spread. Nonetheless, most of China's competitiveness is still confined to its coastline and a few other large cities.

Spreading opportunities

Starting in 2003, as many researchers have urged, China is changing its development priorities from chasing high growth and low inflation, which it has stubbornly followed through the 1990s, to more jobs and, if necessary, a moderate level of inflation.

Economist Wang Jian, in a recent interview with China Daily Hong Kong Edition, said the solution to the imbalance is to have large-scale city-building, especially building of large groups of well-connected cities with flourishing service industries.

China cannot rely on its manufacturing force, however competitive it is, for a sustainable process of development, he said. In terms of manufactured goods, the world market is still rather small, far from enough to generate the 300 million or so jobs China still needs.

For sociologist Li Peilin, as agriculture's share of the nation's total GDP declined from 28 per cent in 1978 to 15 per cent now, it still provides jobs to half of its labour force. According to their household registration, a half-century-old system under the public security bureaucracy's control, 62 per cent of all China's population are still counted as "rural" citizens, wherever their jobs are.

Such huge labour power - joined mostly by men and women who have received quite standard secondary-level education - can be the driving force of China's growth in the next 20 to 30 years - if only accompanied by adequate changes in the social structure, Li said.

Using its abundant rural labour to build new cities and larger cities, and through which, to generate new jobs and a larger job market, that is going to be the nation's development strategy through the 2000s. It has to be.

But the change in social structure will be something more profound than people commonly thought.

According to a recent survey, of China's 120 million "mobile population", meaning people who don't hold jobs where their household registrations are, only one-third, or some 40 million people, are cross-regional migrants.

The largest recipients of migrant workers are Guangdong, which takes in more than 35 per cent of the total group, Zhejiang, Shanghai, Jiangsu, Beijing and Fujian - basically the same regions that contributed the biggest share of the national GDP.

And the largest suppliers of migrant workers are Sichuan, Anhui, Hunan, Jiangxi, Henan and Hubei, the regions that have the largest numbers of rural populations and in some cases are also seeing the highest birth rates.

The survey also reveals that those who can afford cross-regional migration are far from the most desperately poor rural citizens. Put in another way, no one can expect that once the household registration system is gone all the rural poor people can be resettled in the cities, just as not every East German citizen could get a suitable job in West Germany once the Berlin Wall tumbled.

Exactly what kind of changes of "social structure" should there be for the cities to become more accessible for migrants from the rural regions? Mainland social scientists still don't have a list of specific answers.

As many researchers argued, it would take more than just a change of the household registration system. The additional changes would include an education system far more extensive and flexible than the way it is, and an aid system that, contrary to the present urban prejudice that treats migrant workers simply as outsiders, helps them more quickly fit into the changing environment.

That may require to put migrant workers quickly into the various welfare and support systems available to urban residents, most importantly the social welfare and pension systems. That is to turn them into insiders rather than leaving them as outsiders.

Other changes, as proposed by Hu Angang, who frequently claims to have advised the central government over this or that policies, would be for Beijing to make a clear statement about two strategic focuses. One is to develop jobs and "jobs-intensive" industries. The other is to develop a multi-level, multi-channel job market.

The first people to receive the benefit of the nation's new job strategy should be rural citizens, including their entitlement to urban jobs, job training, and employment aid.

In the meantime, rural SMEs (small and medium-sized enterprises), those in farm products processing and distribution in particular, should also be given enough policy incentives, Hu said.