A rare debate about inequality

When the Chinese government gathered this month for its biggest political meeting of the year, it laid out big ambitions.

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It will keep boosting military spending. It will work to dominate artificial intelligence. It will reinforce its manufacturing prowess.But when it comes to some of the country’s most vulnerable citizens, the plan is decidedly less lofty. The government said it would increase the minimum basic pension for rural residents by 20 yuan a month, or less than $3, to a grand total of about $24 a month.

The promised increase is so meager that it has prompted widespread calls for more — even from representatives to China’s rubberstamp legislature who usually spend their annual meeting praising Beijing’s plans.

“This is just too unfair to farmers,” Guo Fenglian, a representative and village leader who was once praised by Mao as a model worker, told a Chinese reporter at the weeklong legislative meeting in Beijing that ended on Thursday.

Guo described seeing farmers in their 80s or 90s still working in the fields, sometimes with canes or stooped backs. “They’re already very old and don’t have the physical ability to work anymore. But the cost of living is high,” she said, according to the Workers’ Daily, a Communist Party publication.