GOLDEN YEARS: Residents of a retirement home in Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region. How to provide quality services for the huge number of elderly people is an urgent challenge to governments at various levels in coming years (XINHUA)

Interference in Need

In face of a new home-buying frenzy, officials and experts have called for rational housing consumption, which implies renting. Recently, Qin Hong, Deputy Director of the Policy Research Center of the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development, said China needed to learn from foreign experience to regulate the housing rental market.

But opponents say the rental market is also operating in accordance with market rules, so rigid regulation and rent controls are unnecessary.

Qin said the rental market should be regulated with explicit laws and regulations not only because China's rental market is among the most unregulated in the world, but also because proper interference is a common practice in the rest of the world. Germany is a typical example.

Several months ago, home sales dropped sharply, and rentals began to rise unexpectedly. In some big cities, rents have risen by 20 percent. Real estate agents are partly to blame, but it has also been caused by recent housing market regulatory policies. No matter what has driven up rents, if there were effective laws to regulate this market, this sort of volatility would be unlikely to happen. Besides, if low-rent public houses were in sufficient supply to meet tenants' demands, private home rentals would be unable to rise so recklessly.

Youth Times

Lessons to Be Learnt

The Yuhang District of Hangzhou in Zhejiang Province recently said it was buying back 28 township health centers, which were privatized several years ago, for 300 million yuan ($45 million). The 29 township health centers in Yuhang were sold for 75 million yuan ($11.25 million) in total. The Health Department of Zhejiang Province says it hopes these purchases will help to win back the public's confidence in grassroots medical institutions.

The Yuhang District Government sold these medical institutions because they were losing huge amounts of money. Problems immediately followed the privatizations. To maximize profits, private investors were reluctant to invest in upgrading medical equipment and facilities and they employed many temporary medical workers. Medical accidents frequently occurred and public dissatisfaction grew.

It's not that market forces shouldn't operate in the public service area, but the government must realize the existence of grassroots health centers is meant to ensure basic medical services for the public, not profit-making.

Xinhua Daily Telegraph

Responsibility for Elders

As China enters an ageing society, greater numbers of senior citizens are considering retirement homes to spend their sunset years. A recent report on national broadcaster CCTV said applicants had to wait up to two years to check into a 500-bed retirement home in Beijing.

At the end of 2009, China had 167 million senior citizens above 60 years old, of whom 18.99 million were over 80 and 28.34 million needed nursing care. But there were only 2.66 million beds in 38,060 retirement homes across the country at the end of 2009. Authorities estimate there is a gap of at least 3 million beds between supply and demand. The situation could be aggravated as the proportion of senior citizens to the total population grows even larger.

Whether senior citizens can get the care they deserve is not only an issue of personal dignity but also an issue of social justice.

Due to China's family planning policy, sometimes a single couple is burdened with the chore of taking care of four elderly parents. Therefore, the government must undertake its responsibilities in guaranteeing life quality for the elderly. What the government needs to do is to provide money for public elderly homes for more beds, offer incentives to private institutions and provide good services needed by senior citizens who choose to live at home.

Dazhong Daily

Brazen Profits

Zhaolin Junior Middle School in Heilongjiang Province is public funded. But during the past 14 years, it has been operating as a private school with government support, and charging much higher tuition fees than public schools should do.

What drives this school to arbitrary fee charges year after year? There are at least two major reasons. At its founding, due to government backing, a large number of excellent teachers were transferred to it from other public schools, so its teaching quality is much better than most other schools. Besides, 20 percent of its graduates have direct access to a provincial-level key senior middle school without examinations. So, despite the high fees, parents are eager to send their children to this school.

The school signed a contract with the local government several years ago agreeing 30 percent of its tuition charges would be submitted to the government. Some parents even said the school was almost the government's cash cow. A regulation issued by the Ministry of Education and six other ministries says during the compulsory education period, students should be admitted by schools in their home areas and schools are not allowed to charge for admissions. But Zhaolin School has made this free process into a money-making tool and it is also helping students to buy into key senior middle schools. It is not only violating relevant state policies, but also making the distribution of educational resources even more unfair.

Beijing Times