On November 5-6, 2005, Harvard Law School hosted “China at Crossroads,” a multidisciplinary conference on the relationship between equality and development in contemporary China. The conference, organized by the US China Law Society, sounded a note of cautious optimism regarding China’s legal reform efforts and the country’s prospects for addressing its growing rich-poor divide. Panelists – who included scholars, practitioners, and policy analysts from China, Europe, and the United States – reviewed the PRC’s transformation from one of the world’s most radically egalitarian societies to one of its most stratified, and offered a range of policy prescriptions for achieving “equitable and sustainable growth.”

The first panel, “Building a Harmonious Society,” addressed the changing dynamics between the “powerful and the powerless” in Chinese society. Moderating the panel was Elizabeth Perry, Harvard’s Henry Rosovsky Professor of Government and a renowned authority on popular protest and grassroots politics in China. Professor Perry opened the panel by suggesting that contemporary China showed pronounced disharmony, and later noted that the panelists’ papers offered an “unsettling” and “grim” picture of growing social tensions. Yet she closed by stressing China’s considerable strides in health and literacy, and noted that, after a semester of intensive study and debate, her advanced seminar in comparative politics had voted unanimously that it would be better to be born as a hypothetical “average Chinese child” today than as its Indian counterpart.

The panelists offered a similarly complex account of a country experiencing both exhilarating economic growth and wrenching social upheaval. William Hsiao, K.T. Li Professor of Economics at the Harvard School of Public Health, lamented the decay of China’s public health system during the reform era. “Peasants protest because they are dissatisfied with their lives,” Professor Hsiao noted, “and one deep aspect of that is the ‘health disparity’” between urban and rural areas. Hsiao argued that in the countryside, the government’s promise to cover citizens’ basic healthcare is often only a “paper guarantee” – since under recent privatization schemes, peasants are usually obliged to pay for the certificates authorizing their “free” care, or for the materials used to deliver it. Meanwhile, Professor Hsiao argued, over 500 million Chinese peasants lack adequate healthcare, and studies indicate that “over one-third of drugs distributed to peasants are counterfeit.”

Professor Helen Siu, a Professor of Anthropology at Yale and author of Mao’s Harvest: Voices From China’s New Generation, discussed her recent research into “uncivil urban spaces” in southern China. In the post-reform era, Profess Siu noted, migrants had congregated around key cities and villages in search of economic opportunity. While they continued to reside in these areas, their non-resident hukou status prevented them from ever becoming local citizens – a continuing source of social tension and occasional unrest.

Professor Yu Jianrong, the Director of the Social Issues Research Center at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, offered a conceptual and statistical analysis of recent peasant protests in China’s rural areas. Rural unrest was growing more frequent, Professor Yu noted, and the tactics and arguments of the protestors were changing. Importantly, protestors were increasingly focused on vindicating their legal rights, and in disputes over land or local corruption, they used references to Chinese law to bolster their claims. Professor Yu argued that while China “will enter into a period of frequent social conflicts” over the next 10-20 years, ultimately the focus on law and reason would help channel social tensions toward productive aims.

Professor Huang Yasheng（黃亞生）addressed the issue of income disparity in China. Professor Huang teaches international management at the MIT Sloan School of Management. He published Selling China in 2003, in which he showed that the lack of competitiveness of domestic companies is chiefly due to the inefficiencies of Chinese financial institutions, hence creating opportunities for foreign direct investment. Using the Gini coefficient, which shows income or wealth inequality within an economic system, he first showed how wide income disparity has evolved in China. China has today greater disparity than most of Western countries, i.e. the United States, Germany, France and the United Kingdom. According to Professor Huang, the major factor that led to such a situation is economic and dates back to the 1990s. The financing of domestic private companies appeared to be more difficult than a decade ago due to the lack of efficient reforms. Hence, economic orientations of the 90s did not favour the creation of a market-based economy. The consequences of such a policy are twofold, affecting both income distribution and social balance.

An expert in the finance and capital markets, Professor Chen Zhiwu （陳志武）teaches at the Yale School of Management and complimented Huang Yasheng’s comments. Professor Chen stressed out inequality caused by state ownership and the role of the state in a balanced approached of economic development. Chen argues that the efficiency of market-oriented reforms is conditioned by political liberalisation, namely democratic institautions. He also focused on the very large geographic resources inequality, and its political origin. Hence, Chongqing started flourishing economically after the central government made it into a provincial-level municipality, benefiting from allocations of investment funds. The allocation of resources has been decided by the government so as to favour some regions, hence it shows a very close link between the Beijing’s economic policy and development at a provincial level. Such inequalities amongst regions might be reduced through a democratic administration of China, which may establish a balanced approach of development.

Finally, Professor Cai Jiming （蔡繼明）, the deputy director of the Institute of Economics at Tsinghua University, exposed the major issues of land reform in China. Cai has focused his research on a comparative study of Marxist and Western economies and is currently a fellow at the Kennedy School of Government. Professor Cai emphasised the lack of fairness in the compensation for land taken by the state, hence reducing drastically peasants’ income. Corruption has also been a major issue in administrative land taking, thus making the whole process highly unfair and unequal.

This panel’s moderator, Professor James Wen, teaches economics at Trinity University and is an expert in the economies of East Asia and developing economies.

Dr Shang made an introductory statement to the third panel, in which he explained the role of the Chinese state in economic development, especially by promoting science and technology. Dr Shang is the Vice-Minister of the Science and Technology of the PRC and serves currently as a Senior Fellow at the Kennedy School of Government. Dr Shang’s presentation included electricity production figures, agricultural improvements and healthcare facilities which have been developed through state-sponsored research and development programs.

The third panel aimed at analysing the Chinese legal system under the following perspective: “Better Governance and Equality before the Law”.

Professor He Weifang （賀衛方）opened the panel by addressing judicial issues from a historical standpoint. Professor He is one of the leading scholars in the field of Chinese constitutional law and is a prolific author (most notably Toward a Time of Rights: A Perspective of the Civil Rights Development in China). He teaches at Peking University and is the Editor-in-Chief of the renowned Peking University Law Journal. He laid the emphasis on the judicial independence, which has no root in Chinese legal tradition. He argued that judges in the late imperial era were under the strict control of the government and this has been kept in modern Chinese judiciary. Moreover, the government lacks a strong interest in developing judicial reform: legal rules are not the only ground for judicial decisions, i.e. decisions motivated by non-legal or customary rules.

Second, Professor Lin Jia （林嘉）is the Vice-Dean of the People’s University School of Law, Beijing addressed the topic of employment discrimination in China. A specialist of social security law and labour law, Professor Lin is a Visiting Scholar at the Harvard Law School’s East Asian Legal Studies Programme. Her point was that Chinese legislation lacks any protection again discrimination in the field of labour law, considering especially the cases of women or the sickely.

Finally, Dr. Eva Pils made comments on the hukou （戶口）system of household registration, which requires an individual to live in a specific area, therefore restraining migrations. (explain very briefly hukou). Pils has been a Research Fellow at the New York University School of Law for two years. She showed how unequal the hukou system may be for citizens, especially for peasants, as this system is administered at a local level. Although the Constitution of the PRC states that all citizens are equal before the law, she stresses out an action on the basis of the Constitution is highly improbable.

The moderator for this third panel was Professor Roderick MacFarquhar, the current director of the Fairbank Center for East Asian Research at Harvard University and a former Member of Parliament, who is well-known for being the author of The Origins of the Cultural Revolution.