$1.41

どういうわけか、Newsweekをゲットした。ヴァージン・アトランティック航空がプロモーション用に無料で配っていたのだ。その3月26日号のMelinda LIU “Beijing’s New Deal”(pp.22-25)という記事の冒頭に曰く、


What a difference a mere $1.41 can make. To most residents of affluent countries, the figure is minuscule, small change. The same goes for most middle-class residents of China’s booming cities. But for rural Chinese farmers, whose $460 average income is less than a third what China’s city dwellers earn, it’s a very different story. One dollar and forty-one cents drove 20,000 residents of Zhushan Village in Hunan province into the street last Monday to violently protest a rise of that amount in bus fares; $1.41 meant life or death to one student, who was reportedly killed in the clash with 1,500 baton-wielding police. Several dozen more protesters were injured. As 600 cops continued to patrol Zhushan last Wednesday, a farmer named Sun, who requested anonymity to avoid trouble with authorities, explained why she and others had risked their lives over so small a sum. Their village is remote and desperately poor, she said. “Some men go and work in construction in town, earning just $64 a month for a few months a year,” she said. “But my family has no income to speak of. We raise just enough crops to feed ourselves, that’s all(p.25).
この話は記事の枕にすぎないのだが、ジニ係数が0.496に到達したことに直面した中国政府の農村政策においてフランクリン・ルーズヴェルトのNew Deal、リンドン・ジョンソンのGreat Societyが参照されていること(p.23)、幾つかの地区での「マイクロ・クレディット」の設立の試みが紹介されている。また、最近の中国で最も注目されているのは、「物件法」の制定による土地所有権保証の拡張だが、そこでも農民が農地を抵当に入れたり売却することは認められていない――”The official fear is that if the rural poor are given the right to sell their plots, tens of millions of peasants could become landless overnight and head to metropolis such as Beijing and Shanghai, turning them into teeming, nightmare cities.”(p.25)