City Beat | Quality over speedy growth: what Xi’s new ‘principal contradiction’ means for Hong Kong
Tammy Tam says China has bid farewell to the period of merely staving off hunger and cold as a new and critical social conflict arises
Honestly speaking, a long speech like this, full of jargon with “Chinese characteristics”, can be hard to digest. So what is this new “principal contradiction” all about and does it ring any bell for Hong Kong?
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The speech had two key words: “new era”. Xi set a two-stage goal to turn China into a “great modern socialist country” by the middle of the century, pointing out: “The principal contradiction facing Chinese society has evolved. What we now face is the contradiction between unbalanced and inadequate development and the people’s ever-growing needs for a better life.”
Putting it in layman’s terms, the most critical social conflict now is the country’s widening wealth gap amid growing public awareness of quality of life. Under such circumstances, quality matters more than speed of development.
This is a significant shift from the previous definition set by Deng Xiaoping in the early 1980s, which was a contradiction “between the ever-growing material and cultural needs of the people and backward social productivity”.
Understandably, that was a time when China was badly in need of economic growth so as to improve people’s basic livelihood, since the country was poverty stricken after decades of political turmoil, including the Cultural Revolution.