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Christmas Eve revelries have quietened down. But the jovial excitement evoked by the adopted Western festival seems to be continuing into next week, when the nation will bask in a three-day New Year's Day celebration.

Although most Chinese have scant idea about the religious implications of Christmas, commercial businesses have succeeded in creating an atmosphere of festivity in China's major cities, such as Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen. Glittering shop windows displaying imported fancy goods, beautiful restaurant waitresses donning Santa costumes, and hilarious parties held in star-class hotels all suggested a new, affluent lifestyle. It seems we Chinese people have become pretty wealthy.

I do not resent the introduction of alien festivals; I also feel glad that a large number of our urban residents are enjoying an increasingly well-to-do living. But a tragedy that happened just a few days before Christmas Day caused a mournfully reflective mood in me, which has lingered for the past few days.

A woman and her five-year-old daughter died when they were hit by a train on a railway in Shenyang in Northeast China's Liaoning Province. The police found an unemployment certificate and a bankbook with a deposit of one yuan (US$12  cents) in the woman's pocket.

The woman was going to the factory she used to work at because she heard that the factory would reimburse laid-off workers' medical fees on that day. State-owned factories, many of which suffer financial difficulties, reimburse their laid-off workers' medical fees occasionally.

The husband said his daughter had never seen a train before, so she went on to the railway in excitement. An eyewitness said he heard the girl saying to her mother: "Will you take me to somewhere to see the Christmas celebration?"

Scattered on the scene were the girl's colourful jacket, hat, shoes and mittens. The father, also a laid-off worker, said they had all been donated by his friends and neighbours. He said he found a bottle of Sprite his daughter had stored in a trunk. "It was given by a relative on October 1 but she treasured it so much that she kept it."

What a trivial gift! Yet the poor little girl treasured it as a valuable piece of property. And the last wish she expressed was a look at how Christmas would be celebrated. I wonder how she would react if someone told her that a Christmas dinner for each guest at the Grand Hotel Beijing would cost 3,288 yuan (US$411) about 1,300 bottles of the soft drink she had favoured.

Her family's poverty was typical of unemployed workers in Shenyang, an old industrial base of China. In the city's famous industrial district of Tiexi, 200,000 people were jobless at the end of 2004. The district's population was 750,000. Most of the unemployed lost their jobs during the reform of State-owned enterprises.

China's drive to reform the old system of planned economy has undoubtedly been a success in raising productive efficiency. The country's dramatic economic growth in the past two decades was the result of that reform.

However, the reform was not without price. The cost was the unemployment of large numbers of workers from State-owned enterprises and the unbalanced distribution of social wealth.

If the problems were the reform's unavoidable cost in its initial stages, now it is time these problems are seriously addressed.

Late leader Deng Xiaoping said in 1992: "At the end of this century, when the nation becomes a well-to-do society, the problem (of disparity between the poor and the rich) should be given a prominent position and be solved."

The present government has taken the issue seriously by calling for the nation to "build a harmonious society." The problem now is what kind of effective measures will be taken to channel more wealth from the grip of enterprise owners to the hands of workers.

Raising the standard of minimum wages and cracking down on rampant tax evasion, for example, are the two things which are absolutely imperative but which have not been done seriously.

Just as I was writing this story, there came a news report of the destruction of another family.

A family of three (parents and a son) with very low income killed themselves in a gas explosion on Christmas Day in Guangzhou, capital of south China's Guangdong Province.

The incident was definitely an individual case but it did remind us that showing our concern for the poverty-stricken sector of our population is urgent.

(China Daily December 28, 2005)