Preventing the price of pork, a crucial food staple in China, from spiraling out of control is key to keeping inflation down, state media said yesterday.
Pork prices have skyrocketed for a variety of reasons over the past weeks, leading Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao (溫家寶) to intervene personally over the weekend, with a warning that social stability could be under threat.
"That the price hike of pork will affect people's diets is a sound reason for Premier Wen to step in," the mass-circulation China Daily said in an editorial.
`Pressing task'
"However, for policymakers, the more pressing task is to prevent spiralling prices from rippling through the economy," it said.
Wen's personal involvement, during a weekend trip to a major pork-producing region in the northwest, "indicates that China's policymakers are paying more attention to the country's inflationary pressure," it said.
According to the Chinese Ministry of Agriculture, last month live pigs nationwide were priced 71.3 percent higher than a month earlier, while pork was up 29.3 percent.
In Beijing yesterday, ordinary citizens showed signs of unease about the rising cost of meat.
Li Cuihua, a 60-year-old retiree, said the rising prices would definitely affect social stability.
"The price of everything is rising nowadays, not only pork. The pace of salary rises cannot keep up with that kind of price hikes," she said.
"Costs of medical cares, education and housing are all increasing," she said. "I'm getting older day by day and I'm quite worried about my health care costs in the future."
The rising price of pork bodes ill for the consumer price index, the main inflation gauge, which rose 3.3 percent in March from a year earlier, followed by a three-percent increase last month.
The Chinese central bank has set three percent as the alarm level. The index is watched carefully by Beijing's leadership not just for its economic but also its political implications.
For almost the past six decades of Communist rule, since 1949, it has been a top priority for the government to keep inflation in check and basic foods in supply.
This was motivated by history as the Nationalist rulers who were toppled by the Communists are widely believed to have been fatally weakened by hyper-inflation in the late 1940s.
Not too concerned
Zhou Zhenbo, a 42-year-old taxi driver whose family spends one third of its income on food, said he did not believe policy makers were too concerned that pork was becoming more expensive.
"It doesn't matter to them," he said.
"We have no say when prices are set," he said. "We can only follow what they laid down."
Liu Jun, a meat vendor in the Jian Hypermarket in downtown Beijing, said pork prices had been rising for about a half month.
"We don't have as many customers as before, but it's been no major loss for us, since for the same amount of pork and the price is now nearly double what it was before," he said.
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