Happiness is one great way to gauge nation’s progress
All eyes and ears are now trained on Beijing and the first session of the 13th National People’s Congress, China’s top legislative body.
Deputies attending the meeting are considering a host of important issues. They are conducting reviews of the Government Work Report and the annual plan on national economic and social development. Meanwhile, there is another very important gathering in China’s capital — that of the country’s top political advisory body, the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference. The two meetings involve around 5,000 deputies and members, and are held in tandem each year.
There is always a massive amount of interest in the two sessions among China watchers because new issues come up each year that often go on to impact the whole nation, as well as the wider world.
Many years ago, the Chinese public followed the two sessions very closely, but this was not so true for other nations. Today, China has become massively important on the global stage, and the two sessions are watched by both a domestic and global audience.
Throughout the two sessions, people will be diligently analyzing not only official speeches and policy announcements, but also what is said at news conferences and on the sidelines.
Those who analyze the sessions usually have their pet subjects and issues that they hope will be discussed. For my part, I expect to hear more about the battle to beat corruption, poverty reduction initiatives and moves to further protect the environment.
And I’m hoping there will be more talk about China’s ongoing efforts to overhaul the economy — its supply-side structural reform — which is one of the most important things happening in China, and by extension, the wider world.
China has been getting a lot of stuff right, economically, in recent decades. Therefore I am full of confidence that its best brains will successfully deal with deep-rooted economic problems, including industrial overcapacity and excessive corporate debt.
In order to slay these drag- ons, China continues to edge away from being the world’s factory, and is now striving to transform itself into a hightech, cutting-edge, value-added, ideas-based nation. It is well on the way to completing this huge and complex shift, one that means many workers will need retraining to begin new jobs.
And as the country shifts to a more sustainable development model, and as it finds more ways to distribute the benefits of its success more evenly, it will need to develop additional ways to measure the very notion of success itself.
The nation’s leadership has already said that in order to more accurately measure true success, the country will put less emphasis on GDP growth and place more upon measuring things like the contentment of the Chinese people and the sustainability of the natural environment.
I hope there will be more talk at the two sessions about how China will continue to introduce such standards of measure, and about how they will be tied to the performance evaluations of managers and local government officials in the years to come.
I expect China will end up developing a new way of looking at how well a country is performing; one that takes into consideration economic indicators as well as a host of other factors. It is likely that such a model will end up inspiring the rest of the world.
At a public lecture at King’s College London last week, Gerda Wielander, associate professor in Chinese and head of modern languages and cultures at the University of Westminster, talked about how China has soared up the world rankings of happiness since 2005, suggesting that standards of living and happiness levels moved in tandem.
There is clearly a correlation between wealth and happiness, and the fact that China moved 55 million people out of poverty between 2013 and 2016 has certainly generated a massive amount of contentment. But experts say the increase in wealth only partly explains China’s significant improvement in overall happiness.
Some pundits even suggest that this newfound contentment might have something to do with the Chinese Dream of national rejuvenation. Contact the writer at earle@ mail.chinadailyuk.com