The rural focus of China's 4th Generation leaders makes sense on healthcare alone

Here's the story with opening paras:

January 14, 2006
Wealth Grows, but Health Care Withers in China
By HOWARD W. FRENCH

FUYANG, China - When Jin Guilian's family took him to a county hospital in this gritty industrial city after a jarring two-day bus ride during which he drifted in and out of consciousness, the doctors took one look at him and said: "How dare you do this to him? This man could die at any moment."

The doctors' next question, though, was about money. How much would the patient's family of peasants and migrant workers be able to pay - up front - to care for Mr. Jin's failing heart and a festering arm that had turned black?

The relatives scraped together enough money for four days in the hospital. But when Mr. Jin, 36, failed to improve, they were forced to move him to an unheated and scantily equipped clinic on the outskirts of Fuyang where stray dogs wandered the grimy, unlighted halls.

China's economic reforms have turned an almost uniformly poor nation into an increasingly prosperous one in the space of a mere generation. But the collapse of socialized medicine and staggering cost increases have opened a yawning gap between health care in the cities and the rural areas, where the former system of free clinics has disintegrated.

In the last several years China has experimented with reforms aimed at improving health care for peasants. The most important is an insurance plan in which participating farmers must make an annual payment of a little more than a dollar to gain eligibility for basic medical treatments ...

This is some serious caboose braking, per my BFA vernacular. It points to a variety of points I like to harp on with China: coast can only go as fast as interior can stand; the future "outsourcing" by China will be mostly "near-sourcing" to the interior regions; service-sector growth will be more important than manufacturing growth in future for China, and its interior integration in coming years and decades will dwarf its exterior integration with the world.

Globalization is a domestic issue everywhere, but no more so than in China. Beijing needs more globalization to keep the country together. Once Deng made that choice to open up, this all becomes a fait accompli, including the ultimate loss of the party's hegemonic position in Chinese politics.

The only question for us is, What do we do to facilitate this process in such a way as to advantage ourselves and the world?

And dreaming of China-the-near-peer-competitor isn't the answer.

Full story found here: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/14/international/asia/14health.html