澎湖貿商十村：醞釀集體罷住

by comcom- 2007/01/04



看到沒??尤其是最後一段
這群人真是貪得無饜
到何時台灣人買房子.政府才能補助我們?
做做夢去吧~~

貧富差距正在撕裂新加坡社會

by Ashinakhan 2006/12/26

Income gap tears at Singapore social fabric
By Geert De Clercq
Tue Dec 19, 8:01 AM ET

Disclaimer：Reuters保有本文一切版權。為尊重著作權，本譯文業已經適當刪節，僅為向讀者簡介原文要義使用，並加註譯者個人評論意見，不一定能完整忠實表達原文意旨。欲閱讀完整原文請至Reuters網站點閱，或購買該社刊載本文之出版品。]

譯者感想：在一大群”學者專家”整天在媒體上大談”Ｍ型社會”，好像台灣在民進黨執政下，即將落入萬劫不復的深淵的同時，希望大家能好好看看這篇文章。看看我們的社會裡有一群崇拜新加坡「開明專制」的教徒們想把台灣推到什麼方向。也讓我們看看這個「開明專制」的社會到底給人民什麼東西。

台灣其實和很多國家比起來，算是一個很可愛的社會了。

〔路透社新加坡電〕當新加坡國會議員黃守金（Wee Siew Kim）十八歲的女兒黃淑敏（Wee Shu Min）看到一個新加坡人在部落格上發紓他對失業的憂慮時，她決定要給這位仁兄好好地說個教。

她在自己的部落格中公開指責對方是「我國許多低下猥瑣、好吃懶做又自以為是的社會蛀蟲其中一員」。她更在文章的結尾宣稱「拜託，從我這沒同情心的精英面前滾開！」

黃淑敏的言論固然惹惱數以百計的部落格網客，她的老爸—在總理李顯龍髦下擔任國會議員的黃守金—在接受新加坡當地報紙採訪時說出：「她的基本論點確實是有道理的。」時，更將戰火延燒到部落格以外的真實世界。
這些人的嘴臉你們有沒有覺得似曾相識？

這個事件突顯了新加坡社會日漸深化的內部矛盾，使得一向高舉“縮小貧富差距”為首要施政目標之一的人民行動黨和李顯龍總理面上無光。

「這種話從執政黨議員的口裡講出來，簡直就是一顆不折不扣的政治炸彈。」當地政論家Seah Chiang Nee對路透社表示：「如果放任這樣的自大無知和精英主義持續惡化，人民行動黨在未來的選舉中只會更加不利。」

新加坡人均國民生產毛額高達27,000美元，是繼日本後亞洲第二富國，即便與歐盟成員比較，也可以排在義大利和西班牙之間。然而以所得分配的角度來看，新加坡可就完全沒有這種優等生的資格了。

根據聯合國2006年人類發展報告的資料顯示，以衡量家戶所得不均程度的吉尼係數來排名，新加坡的係數高達42.5，正好排在非洲的蒲隆地和肯亞之間。

新加坡國家發展部長馬寶山上個月接受路透社時指出：「沒錯，我國的吉尼係數是很高。我們已經著手經由國宅、健保和教育計畫試圖縮小貧富差距，但我們不會以干涉薪資水準的方式處理這個問題。」

「福利」是一個低下的概念

新加坡沒有員工福利、退休金和法定最低工資等制度，但該國為國民提供低廉而質優的教育、補助國民的醫療健康花費，而且政府還為首次申購國民住宅的民眾提供補貼。

上個月是新加坡五月大選以來新國會的第一個會期，會期的主要議題幾乎完全圍繞著貧富差距的問題打轉。

李顯龍總理否決了引入老人年金、最低工資制及歐式社福體制的提議。

「我們認為“福利”是一句髒話。反對黨──我想是工人黨吧──叫囂要求一個“永久無條件以需求為導向的社福體系”。我認為那是一句更長更髒的髒話。」

但他也承認在９７年亞洲金融風暴以後，新加坡的貧富差距已然擴大，更指出他的施政方向是「將天平往對低收入族群有利的一方傾斜」

雖然李顯龍的人民行動黨不用害怕失去在國會中的壓倒性多數──８４席中人民行動黨有８２席，但新加坡日益惡化的貧富不均已經損及了政府的威信。

今年五月六日的大選中，工人黨創下了長年以來最好的成績。該黨主席林瑞蓮在其參選的集選區中囊括了44%的選票（新加坡分只選出一席的單選區，和選出複數席次，但是採兩黨對決，獲勝黨贏取該選區所有席次的集選區。林瑞蓮雖然在阿裕尼區拿下44%，但工人黨在該區是以56:44敗選），而李顯龍在其選區則被一群名不見經傳的三十幾歲年輕候選人給瓜分了34%選票。

林瑞蓮雖然未能在選區對決中勝選，但仍然依新加坡法律規定，以最高票落選人的身份成為不具投票權的國會議員。她接受路透社專訪時指出：「他們（指人民行動黨）其實也擔心如果不正視貧富不均這個問題的話，很有可能會被這個核爆的落塵波及。」

李顯龍在國會中聲明他將計畫改善國民醫療體系以及提高低收入戶住房補貼，並且擴大「以工代賑」計畫，以改善低收入職工的收入。

就在大選五天前的五月一日（嗯，時間點很令人好奇），新加坡政府便付出了1.5億星幣給三十三萬名低收入職工，李顯龍更承諾明年也會有一個類似的計畫，計畫內容將隨著2007年2月15日的總預算案一起公佈。

何不食肉糜？

評論家指出，這個十八歲小孩部落格所點燃的怒火，絕大部分是來自於人民對新加坡這一群把持政權的特權精英階層不知民瘼的惡劣觀感。

要想成為新加坡的政府體系統治精英的一分子，唯一的路是在國內唸完名校後，拿到有名的政府奬學金出國唸書。

雖然這些名校和獎學金名義上是對全民開放的，但其實精英階層的子女在爭取這些名額時是享盡優勢的。像部落格事件當事人黃淑敏就是和他父親黃守金議員一樣，就讀萊佛士初級學院（註：新加坡的junior college其實就是美式學制的高中，據Wikipedia的Raffles Junior College條目指稱，這一家高中是美國以外地區送進最多畢業生到一流美國大學的高中）。而黃守金不僅止是國會議員而已，更是國營軍火商ST Engineering的高階經理人。

在新加坡海峽時報的一篇「精英紅眼症」的文章中引述官方資料指出，過去五年裡公費留學生有1/3是出自於月入一萬星幣（約二十萬台幣）的家庭，而這樣的家庭只佔全新加坡人口的13%。

同篇報導也指出，公費生中家庭月入二千星幣以下者只佔全部公費生的7%。

諷刺網站TalkingCock.com的創辦人吳榮平先生指出，雖然人民行動黨的第一代領導人在人民眼中是與人民站在一起的，但現在已經不是如此了。

「黃淑敏事件之所以會招致如此猛烈的炮火，是因為人民已經強烈地感受到行動黨根本是一群活在象牙塔裡不食人間煙火的傢伙，他們是一群“何不食肉糜”的晉惠帝。」

Power, corruption and lies

by Will Hutton

To the west, China is a waking economic giant, poised to dominate the world. But, argues Will Hutton in this extract from his new book, we have consistently exaggerated and misunderstood the threat - and the consequences could be grave

Monday January 8, 2007
The Guardian

The emergence of China as a $2 trillion economy from such inauspicious beginnings only 25 years ago is such a giddy accomplishment that the temptation to see its success as proof positive of your own prejudices is overwhelming. And the west's broad prejudice is that China is growing so rapidly because it has abandoned communism and embraced capitalism. China's own claim - that it is building a very particular economic model around what it describes as a socialist market economy - is dismissed as hogwash, the necessary rhetoric the Communist party must use to disguise what is actually happening. China proves conclusively that liberalisation, privatisation, market freedoms and the embrace of globalisation are the only route to prosperity. China is on its way to capitalism but will not admit it.

But the closer you get to what is happening on the ground in China, its so-called capitalism looks nothing like any form of capitalism the west has known and the transition from communism remains fundamentally problematic. The alpha and omega of China's political economy is that the Communist party remains firmly in the driving seat not just of government, but of the economy - a control that goes into the very marrow of how ownership rights are conceived and business strategies devised. The western conception of the free exercise of property rights and business autonomy that goes with it, essential to any notion of capitalism, does not exist in China.

The truth is that China is not the socialist market economy the party describes, nor moving towards capitalism as the western consensus believes. Rather it is frozen in a structure that I describe as Leninist corporatism - and which is unstable, monumentally inefficient, dependent upon the expropriation of peasant savings on a grand scale, colossally unequal and ultimately unsustainable. It is Leninist in that the party still follows Lenin's dictum of being the vanguard, monopoly political driver and controller of the economy and society. And it is corporatist because the framework for all economic activity in China is one of central management and coordination from which no economic actor, however humble, can opt out.

In this environment genuine wholesale privatisation is impossible and liberalisation has well-defined limits, as President Hu Jintao himself brutally reminds us. The party, he says, "takes a dominant role and coordinates all sectors. Party members and party organisations in government departments should be brought into full play so as to realise the party's leadership over state affairs". It may be true that party organisations in the provinces (some with populations bigger than Britain's) and in the chief cities are jealous of their autonomous local political control, but all retain the discretionary power to do what they choose and override any challenge or complaint from any non-state actor - or, indeed, from state actors if they cross the will of the party.

Absolute power corrupts, and the Chinese Communist party has become one of the most corrupt organisations the world has ever witnessed. The combination of absolute power and an ideology that palpably no longer describes reality is a virus that is morally and psychologically undermining the regime. And if the regime wobbles, then its capacity to sustain the unsustainable economic structures will wobble and Leninist corporatism will unravel. Beijing's authority could fragment and China's provinces reassert their destructive independence as they did in the 1910s and 20s, or a new and fiercely repressive regime could try to hold the country together abandoning economic openness and market reforms - and even pick some international fights (such as invading Taiwan?) to rally the country to its side. It is because this prospect is so real that the task of peacefully moving to a sustainable capitalism, and building the necessary institutions to do it, is so vital for both China and the world.

Ever since the late 1990s the party leadership, then under Hu's predecessor Jiang Zemin, has rightly become more and more preoccupied with how corruption is corroding the party. "If we do not crack down on corruption, the flesh-and-blood ties between the party and the people will suffer a lot and the party will be in danger of losing its ruling position, or possibly heading for self-destruction," Jiang declared in 2002, in his last political report to the National Congress. High-level officials had been arrested and imprisoned for embezzlement and racketeering; they included the party secretary and mayor of Beijing, Chen Xitong, a member of the Politburo. Cheng Kejie, vice-chairman of the National People's Congress, was executed for taking pounds 2.5m in kickbacks for arranging land deals and contracts for private business. In the financial system the highest-profile casualties were three of prime minister Zhu Rongji's hand-picked "can-do commanders", selected to sort out the financial crisis of the late 1990s, and one of whom, Li Fuxiang, leaped to his death from the seventh floor of Beijing's Hospital 304 while under investigation. To put this in a British context, it is as if the Mayor of London, the speaker of the House of Commons, the chief executive of HSBC, along with a deputy governor of the Bank of England and the deputy chief executive of the Financial Services Authority had all been imprisoned for fraud with one committing suicide.

For all the strengthening of the anti-corruption and Orwellian sounding "Central Discipline Inspection Committee", corruption remains deeply embedded. The number of arrests of senior cadres members above the county level quadrupled between 1992 and 2001, and since then have included a ring of officials in Gansu, one of China's poorest provinces, caught embezzling pounds 500m. Four provincial governors and one provincial party secretary have been charged recently - the top posts in China outside Beijing. And in September 2006 came the arrest of Shanghai party secretary and member of the politburo Chen Liangyu for his involvement in the misappropriation of pounds 206m of social security funds.

The Chinese economist Hu Angang, in his trailblazing book Great Transformations in China: Challenges and Opportunities, calculates that over the late 90s the cumulative annual cost of corruption was between 13.3% and 16.9% of GDP and is still around that level today. Every incident of corruption - smuggling, embezzlement, theft, swindling, bribery - arises in the first place from the unchallengeable power of communist officials and the lack of any reliable, independent system of accountability and scrutiny. Corruption has become part of the system's DNA, now threatening the integrity of the state.

To see how, look no further than the combination of one-party control and corruption and how it deforms the legal system. The judicial apparatus is politicised from top to bottom. Every president and vice-president of a court is appointed by the party; and the courts are funded by provincial governments. The court bureaucracy works on the same basis as the rest of the government, with a party committee system superintending each rung of the court hierarchy. Judges often make decisions at the instruction of the committee or government independently of the legal merits of the case.

Many judges still have no formal legal training - the majority are retired army officers, only too ready to do the party's bidding. The scale of the corruption is stunning. In 2003, 794 judges were tried for corruption (out of a national total of 200,000). In 2003 and 2004, the presidents of the provincial high courts of Guangdong and Hunan were both found guilty of corruption. When the party does not or cannot influence the judgment in a case, it can use its influence over the police to decide whether to slow down or not enforce the judgment. Enforcement rates in China are lamentable; for example, only 40% of provincial high court decisions are enforced. The lack of a clear system of property rights, with the party-state claiming particular privileges, can make debt enforcement against state organisations close to impossible.

As a potential watchdog to correct any of this, the media is crippled. China now has more than 2,000 newspapers, 2,000 television channels, 9,000 magazines and 450 radio stations, but they are all under the watchful eye of the party in Beijing or provincial propaganda departments. These authorities issue daily instructions on what may and may not be reported; journalists who digress will be suspended from working or even imprisoned. China is estimated to have 42 journalists in prison, the highest number in the world. Editors know roughly how much slack they have; but recently, under Hu Jintao, there has been a tightening of the leash. The right to travel independently and report from a non-local city had allowed more aggressive reporting of corruption; but it has been rescinded. Some prominent editors have been fired. For instance, Yang Bin, editor of China's most forceful tabloid, the Beijing News, was dismissed in 2005 for reporting village protests against unfair confiscation of land. Other journalists have been prohibited from publishing. The Committee to Protect Journalists, in its 2005 report on repression of the media, quotes the government-run People's Daily: "[During 2004] censorship agencies permanently shut down 338 publications for printing 'internal' information, closed 202 branch offices of newspapers, and punished 73 organisations for illegally 'engaging in news activities'."

In February 2006, three of China's most distinguished elders - Li Rui, a former aide to Mao Zedong, Hu Jiwei, former editor of the People's Daily, and Zhu Houze, a former party propaganda chief - published a letter condemning the approach: "History demonstrates that only a totalitarian system needs news censorship, out of the delusion that it can keep the public locked in ignorance," they wrote. Far from ensuring stability, they continued, such media repression would "sow the seeds of disaster".

All this is obvious to western eyes; what is less obvious is the way the same system of control undermines the economy. Successful businesses have to be successful in business terms - with managers freely exploiting opportunities, developing products and brands and promoting on ability. No such autonomy is possible within Leninist corporatism; party needs come before those of business, enforced by a national system of party committees in every enterprise, finance from state-owned banks and a complex system of accounting and ownership rights that leaves majority ownership of most enterprises with the state. Private shareholders have very limited ownership rights; companies' fixed assets are separated out in company accounts and can still only be legally owned by state and public bodies. And as MIT economist Yasheng Huang argues, government shareholders interfere, especially if a firm is successful. Countless Chinese firms, he says, have been driven to bankruptcy or thwarted in their growth ambitions because the government has exercised its ownership privileges to meet party objectives.

In short, the party state is at the centre of a spiderweb of control of the economy, radiating out from the tight ownership and direction of the 57 sectors the party considers the economy's strategic heart like steel and energy to a more relaxed stance the less important the party considers an enterprise's activity - such as packaging or hairdressing. Even they can be controlled if need be. The general rule is that the more politicised and controlled a Chinese enterprise, the lower its productivity and performance. Thus the performance of China's State Owned Enterprises (SOEs), which control two-thirds of industrial assets, has hardly improved during 20 years of reform. One in three of their employees is estimated to be structurally idle. SOEs are on a financial edge and barely profitable. According to one influential estimate, even the tiniest upward movement in interest rates or the slightest decline in sales would mean that 40%-60% of their enormous bank debts would not be serviced, rendering the entire Chinese banking system bankrupt. They are commercial and business disaster areas.

Even large private companies, although better performing, are still affected. Davin Mackenzie, managing director of iVentures, which is based in Beijing, says that almost no private company, however well run, wants to leave the opaque, informal world of guanxi personal relationships in which the main aim is to hide revenue, cash, and profits from potential political direction. The vast majority, he says, run themselves out of the "cash box in the back of the Mercedes". Most private Chinese companies have three sets of accounts - one for the banks, one for the tax authorities, and one for management. Most do not last long; the average duration is three years. The law of the jungle prevails: you do what you can get away with. China is the counterfeiters' paradise, where intellectual property rights are neither respected nor enforced. Between 15% and 20% of all well-known brands in China are fake; two-thirds of the imports confiscated by US Customs as fakes were made in China. Counterfeiting is estimated to represent 8% of GDP - eloquent testimony to Chinese business strategies and the ineffectiveness of the legal system.

The cumulative result of all this is economic weakness, despite the eye-catching growth figures. Innovation is poor; half of China's patents come from foreign companies. Its growth depends on huge investment, representing an unsustainable 40% or more of GDP financed by peasant savings. But China now needs $5.4 of extra investment to produce an extra $1 of output, a proportion vastly higher than that in economies such as Britain or the US. But 20 years ago, China needed just $4 to deliver the same result. In other words, an already gravely inefficient economy has become even more inefficient. China's national accounts tell the same story. Hu Angang calculates that China is now back to the Mao years in term of the inefficiency with which it uses capital to generate growth.

Behind all these problems lie Leninist corporatism. Capitalism, I contend, is much more than the profit motive and the freedom to set prices which China's reforms have permitted. It is a system in which many different actors freely take different decisions according to their best judgment; some are right and some are wrong, but the system never has to bet on any one being right for everyone - as in an authoritarian system of centralised economic control. But this economic pluralism is closely intertwined and dependent upon the wider political capacity of different citizens to be able to be part of a public space in which they can debate options and choices. It is because democracies possess such public spaces that, over decades, even the weakest tend to manage themselves better than authoritarian states. There is less likelihood of group-think, conformism and top-down plans that militate against good decisions - or of the quick reversal of poor decisions.

This public sphere is a whole network of "soft" independent processes of scrutiny, justification, transparency and accountability that range from a free media to independent justice. Representative government in which the people regularly vote for their governors is but the coping stone of this structure. And the processes of scrutiny and deliberation do not stop just with the state - the same processes are extended to capitalism and the market economy, and through having to justify themselves, makes them more honest and better performing.

But none of this can happen if individuals are not free and capable of being involved - and having the capacity, through the independence that property ownership, education, trade union membership and citizenship confers, freely to challenge and change individual policies, whether they are those of the government or the company they work for. These social processes work best the less social distance there is between people. The more inequality and the more social distance, the less well these processes of pluralism, capabilities and accountability can function. And the less well capitalism then functions. So China leads to an unexpected insight. Capitalism works best the more inequality is capped - and the more and better developed its democratic institutions.

The west is unforgivably ignorant about China's shortcomings and weaknesses, which leads it vastly to exaggerate the extent of the Chinese "threat". China is certainly emerging as a leading exporter, but essentially it is a sub-contractor to the west. It has not bucked the way globalisation is heavily skewed in favour of the rich developed nations. Its productivity is poor; it lacks international champions; its innovation record is lamentable; it relies far too much on exports and investment to propel its economy. To characterise China as an unstoppable force whose economic model is unbeatable and set to swamp us - the stuff of almost every ministerial and business lobby speech - is to make a first-order mistake.

Rather, the west needs to understand the depth of China's problems and the possibility, if not probability, of an economic and political convulsion as China seeks their resolution. What the west must avoid is a position where it forces the Chinese leaders' hand and China retreats towards economic isolation and freezing the reform process. The challenge to the global trading and financial system would be profound; not only would an important source of global demand be scaled back, a key source of financing the US trade deficit would be removed. China's progress would be shaken to its core.

The interest of the west is to help China avoid this fate and encourage a peaceful transition to a pluralist China within a legitimate system of accountability; a country that is comfortable with liberal globalisation and the international rule of law. To describe the goal of policy in this way is demanding enough; more demanding still is to execute it. The simple extrapolations of China's growth, predicting that it will eventually become a one-party, economic colossus, lead to an alarmist climate in which it is easier to justify trade protection or, in the United States, potential military activism. Such responses are naive. We have to play it long, encourage and help to co-manage the change that must come. Only thus will the world be a safer and still prosperous place.

· Will Hutton's The Writing on the Wall is published on January 18 at pounds 20.