Hua Lianguo, 62, a retired engineer, withdrew his usual pension
Wednesday from a bank near his residential community rather than
the office in his former enterprise, a large state-owned metallurgy
firm in northeast China's Jilin
Province.
Moreover, the community where he and his colleagues have lived
for decades has recently hired a new logistics company to deal with
community management, replacing the office dispatched by the
metallurgy company.
As a result of on-going economic structural reforms, quite a few
employees feel much more profound, in-depth changes than they did
years before, said Prof. Tian Yipeng of sociology with prestigious
Jilin University, adding that many people had to learn to live
without umbrella of the enterprise-sponsored welfare.
During the past decades, the state-owned firms functioned like
all-inclusive tiny societies and many of them ran a large number of
facilities including cafeterias, libraries, nurseries and
kindergartens, schools, barbershops and even hospitals and hotels,
bringing some kind of the comprehensive, cradle-to-tomb welfare
benefits to the employees.
The welfare system together with other problems such as
monoeconomic structure seriously negatively affected the
enterprise's operation and development especially in northeast
China, which was a leading industrial center around China in the
1950s and 1960s, and became sluggish in marching toward the market
economy in the mid-1990s.
In an effort to find a way out, huge enterprises started to
discard unessential welfare burdens. In Jilin province, an
independent logistics company was established last December to deal
with the living communities of employees of three gigantic
state-owned enterprises.
The enterprises had too many distractions in the old system,
said Zhang Xiaopei, general manager of the state-owned Jilin
Chemical Industrial Group Company, adding that it was high time to
withdraw from all the unnecessary fields and focus on their major
businesses.
The central government also kicked off a welfare reform in
northeastern Liaoning
Province in the year 2001 and so far a total of 6.547 million
people participated in the social welfare system, accounting for
76.1 percent of all the employed. The reform would, too, start in
Jilin and Heilongjiang
provinces next year.
The reform is conducive in the process of revitalizing the
economy and at the same time it is likely to bring more great
impact to society, and the government is held responsible to
further improving the social welfare system, said Prof. Tian
Yipeng.
Including the welfare reform, a range of prompt measures has
been applied to spur the state-owned enterprises. In September, the
Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central
Committee called for accelerated efforts to revitalize the old
northeast industrial base, describing it as a long-term and arduous
task.
Covering the provinces of Heilongjiang, Jilin and Liaoning, the
northeast China region played a vital role in the country's
industrial development in 1950s to early 1970s.
The ratio of the region's industrial output value to the
national total dropped to nine percent from a record 17
percent.
The Chinese government decided in early September to turn those
outdated, rusty and lagging industrial centers in the northeast and
other parts of China into modern industrial bases, making them new
and essential growth areas of the national economy.
(Xinhua News Agency October 9, 2003)