China’s Plan Follow-up

I dug around a little, and found this work report presented by China's Premier Wen Jiabao. It summarizes accomplishments of the last 5 years, but does not actually peg them to the initial goals. Still, he does specifically acknowledge a couple of issues where China was not making any accomplishments. So it does make me think that the 5 Year Plans are genuine planning documents and not propaganda, even if their contents are carefully discussed.

I was especially impressed by the following passage:

We actively yet prudently carried out the reform of the pharmaceutical and healthcare systems, and completed a basic medical insurance system for non-working urban residents and a new rural cooperative medical care system, which benefit 432 million working and non-working urban residents and 835 million rural residents.


I don't know if I would be satisfied with this program if I was one of China's urban immigrants. But I still found it impressive that live-and-let-die China is working towards universal health care when we Americans can't even agree that it is a benefit to society.