Sowing seeds of innovation
By Erik Nilsson (China Daily)
Updated: 2008-03-05 07:29

In order to succeed in its rural reform, the Chinese government must not only continue increasing investment there but also approach spending with an ever-stronger spirit of innovation.

According to government figures, Chinese farmers' per capita net income rose 9.5 percent in real terms last year. Arguably, the greatest contributor to the most rapid income increase of the past decade was greater government investment - an 80 billion yuan ($11.2 billion) increase over 2006 to a total of 420 billion yuan.

According to the New Year working report of Chen Xiwen, director of the office of the central leading group on rural work, the central government will add a record 100 billion yuan to its rural investment this year, taking the total to 520 billion yuan.

However, the figures alone tell only part of the story; it's how the money is spent that actualizes improvement of the lives of rural Chinese. And the National People's Congress is to allocate that money by the end of the ongoing session.

That's where the second, and most important component for deputies' consideration, comes in - innovation.

I recently joined a reporting team that traveled to rural Hainan to examine the provincial "ecological civilization village" program. In the village of Yangtan, in a suburb of the provincial capital of Haikou, we met Wang Wenjin.

Since the farmer's community became an "ecological civilization village" in 1996, it has benefited from paved roads, a new well and hygiene improvements. Most importantly to Wang, his income increased 100-fold last year, when he traded in sugarcane crops for harvests of olives, he said. The village head said that overall, villagers' average income has increased 10-fold since they started cultivating vegetables instead of sugarcane and mushu (cassava).

The ecological civilization program is one among many specimens of the CPC's use of innovation in scientifically developing the "new socialist countryside" - a concept that will be better realized if the government increasingly views rural areas as laboratories for imaginative experiments of development.

Other such examples abound; in January, the Ministry of Finance piloted a program offering a 13 percent subsidy for mobile phones and color TVs to farmers in Shandong, Henan and Sichuan provinces.

It sparked a shopping frenzy among farmers and provided a new market for a domestic appliance industry.

The Xinhua News Agency reported that on the first day of the program, Sichuan Changhong Electric Co sold more than 2,500 appliances to rural dwellers. The products were also inventively customized to meet rural conditions; the TVs were mouse-proofed, the mobile phone characters made larger for the elderly and the refrigerators were simply labeled and energy efficient.

Many other such innovative programs have been launched over the past year in the fields of rural financing, education and healthcare.

However, none of these pilots or programs are end-alls, but rather show what could be. They require more creative modifications to realize their full potential.

And their relative success demonstrates the vitality of innovation in effective rural reform and the potential benefit of pioneering new creative initiatives.

So those in control of spending must bear in mind that sowing the seeds of innovation in China's farmlands could bear the sweetest fruit for its people.

(China Daily 03/05/2008 page7)