The United Nations has acknowledged China's progress in human development and at the same time underscored that continuous reforms and social innovation hold the key to inclusive and equal human development.
The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) says in its annual China National Human Development Report launched on Aug. 22 in Beijing that the country's progress has come with increased inequality and disparity, and therefore provides consultations to address them through innovation on social policies and public governance.
As for the UN standard, human development encompasses the protection of people's social rights to healthcare and education, equality among different communities and genders, and mass participation in public affairs, said Xu Haoliang, the UN assistant secretary-general and the UNDP director for Asia and Pacific at the launch of the report.
Xu said that inclusive development helps sustain economic growth and balance social stability. In doing so, the economy has favorable environment for its development, whose benefits are accessible to the vast majority of society.
"It is essential that 'inclusive' human development and economic growth do not conflict, but work together to promote the basic conditions of sustainable development," said the UN assistant secretary-general.
Agi Veres, the UN resident representative and the UNDP country director in China, acknowledged China's economic and social development as described in the report. She noted that the annual report aims to reflect the year-on-year changes of a given country's human development, although for China the trend will always be upward.
Veres also said that China's achievements in human development area are the result of "many factors in interaction," rather than one or a few factors that stood out alone.
In presenting the report, the UNDP hopes to promote China's inclusiveness while allowing lessons to be drawn from China's poverty reduction, universal education and social security system, since they will provide experience and examples for other developing countries. China is now ranked the 90th out of 188 countries, which is mainly due to rapid economic development and partly to social policy, the report has found.
The report highlights that China's advancement has brought it among "high-human-development-level countries." The past four decades of growth have made China the world's second largest economy, successfully lifting some 660 million people out of poverty between 1978 and 2010. In education, the net enrollment rate of school-age children into primary school has reached 99 percent over the past decades. China's average life expectancy has also increased from 67.9 in 1981 to 74.8 in 2010, quoting from UN statistics.
China's strive for shaping an inclusive society is reflected in its land-use rights reform, education reform, social security reforms, and the strengthening of autonomous governance at the village level. More recently, targeted poverty reduction policies are determined to eradicate poverty nationwide by 2020, and not at the cost of the environment.
Despite the achievements in human development on the aspect of economic growth, income disparities in China have widened, with China's Gini coefficient, a common measure of inequality, ranking among the high income disparity category countries.
