[...]
>(Besides, China's famines have much more to do with bad planning than
>killing mosquitoes).
Talking about which, here are two stories from yesterday's South China Morning Post...
Enzo
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Wednesday December 9 1998
Corrupt official gets 10 years
AGENCIES
The former deputy chairman of Hebei Provincial People's Congress has been jailed for 10 years after being found guilty of taking 170,000 yuan (HK$158,000) in bribes from Hong Kong and mainland businessmen.
Jiang Dianwu took payments when he was party secretary of Baoding county in 1993. Jiang, 61, is an ex-member of the National People's Congress.
Meanwhile, investigators have uncovered a web of graft so severe that a street where officials lived was known locally as "Corruption Street". Officials living in 16 of the 18 houses in a street in Guangxi's Hepu county were being investigated for serious offences, with seven under arrest, the Wenhui Daily said.
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Wednesday December 9 1998
Beijing urged to drop privatisation 'taboo'
WILLY WO-LAP LAM
Privatisation is the only way out for China's ailing enterprises, a leading reformer said yesterday.
Cao Siyuan , who heads a consultancy on mergers and bankruptcies in Beijing, told a conference at the University of Hong Kong it was unfortunate privatisation was still considered a taboo in the mainland.
"Some ideologues believe that Marx and Engels taught that the state must have total control over enterprises," Mr Cao said. "Yet the two philosophers were never advocates of state socialism."
Mr Cao said the state sector in China should only account for 15 per cent of the economy.
"At present, state firms take up roughly 70 per cent of the means of production but they are only responsible for 30 per cent of the value of industrial production," he said.
Mr Cao quoted figures from the official press showing that up to September, state enterprises had run up losses amounting to 74.8 billion yuan (HK$69.56 billion).
However, the non-state sector, including private firms and village and township enterprises, was still being discriminated against in areas such as getting loans from banks, he said.
"We must amend the constitution to ensure that the inviolability of private property is enshrined," Mr Cao said.
The reformer, who helped draft the country's first bankruptcy law, said he was disappointed that the administration had, since July, asked regional administrations to slow down the pace of selling off medium-sized and small firms.
"Some leaders say they are afraid state assets are being siphoned off through corrupt means," he said. "Yet if the ailing state firms are not privatised, they may soon become totally worthless."
The economist, however, was not optimistic that Beijing would take radical steps to move reform forward.
"More than 90 per cent of the reforms tried out since the late 1970s have been forced upon the administration rather than adopted at its own initiative," he said.
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