News
Look at Tibet growth without tainted glasses
Updated: 2015-02-09By Yang Minghong ( China Daily )
Tibet started developing a new pension insurance scheme for rural people in 2009, which by last year had covered all rural residents. Although the higher pension premium people pay for 15 years, the higher pension they will get after reaching the age of 60, rural residents above 16 years have the liberty to decide whether or not to be part of the new rural pension insurance scheme. Irrespective of the new insurance scheme, however, senior citizens in rural areas can get a pension of 105 yuan a month thanks to the government's subsidy.
The first public welfare system in China was also started in Tibet, in 2006, to help disadvantaged groups and unemployed college graduates to find jobs. Since then the government has spent more than 370 million yuan on the system.
Since in market economy only the fittest can survive, people weak in skills, language and communications are marginalized to different extents in different countries. But Tibet's development policies are more inclusive, for they minimize the negative impact of market economy on the lower-level workforce. Tibet has been benefiting from the country's reform and opening-up policies while boosting its own development and improving local people's livelihoods.
So the central government's preferential policies for and other provinces' and State-owned enterprises' assistance to Tibet serve not only the people of Tibet and neighboring Sichuan, Qinghai, Gansu and Yunnan provinces, but also the dozens of ethnic groups living in Tibetan areas.
The authors of the Human Rights Watch report should have at least seen this (bigger) picture in the historical context before arriving at its fallacious conclusions. What the people behind the Human Rights Watch report have done is thus of little value.
The author is a researcher in social development at Sichuan University.