Chinese voice concerns before parliamentary meeting
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"Livelihood issues" are Chinese people's top concerns as shown in online polls ahead of the annual parliamentary and political advisory sessions.
Chinese netizens have voiced their complaints online and hope their voices could be heard by top leaders, national lawmakers and political advisors, who will soon gather in Beijing for the two sessions.
Pension, housing and health care are among the top concerns, according to polls conducted by people.com.cn of Party's flagship newspaper People's Daily, xinhuanet.com of Xinhua News Agency and cctv.com of the state-run TV network.
"Pension" has earned 25,508 votes at people.com.cn, followed by anti-corruption, housing price, the income gap, employment and health care, among others. "Pension" also ranked among the top five concerns at cctv.com.
Netizens called for the scraping of the long-time "dual pension scheme," in which civil servants and other public employees were entitled to pensions several times the amount of citizens employed by non-public entities.
"The current pension scheme widens the wealth gap," a person posted at xinhuanet.com.
The amount of pension given to ordinary citizens was determined by one's monthly payment dedicated to their social security account before they retired, and is fixed to the average social income.
Retirees of non-public entities get much less than their salary before retirement. But the amount of pension government employees get is almost the same as they got before retirement, sometimes two or three times higher than a factory worker.
The government raised the pension for ordinary citizens by 10 percent, or 120 yuan monthly per person, starting from Jan. 1, 2010. This is the sixth time the pension has been raised since 2005. But the amount still cannot match that of civil servants'.
