Houston Community News >> China Life Expectancy to Jump
2/12/2007 BEIJING (Reuters) -
Average life expectancy in China will jump 13 years to 85 years and all
households will be lifted out of poverty by the middle of the century, Chinese
academics forecast in a report issued in state media on Monday.
The number of years a Chinese child spends in school will almost double to 14
years and an increasingly affluent population will spend a far smaller
proportion of their income on food, the official China Daily said, citing a
20-volume report called an Outline for China's Sustainable Development.
But the weighty report, put together by 184 academics and policy makers mainly
from the influential Chinese Academy of Sciences, warned a growing population
and environmental problems posed risks to China's sustainable development, the
Chinese News Service said.
Poor use of energy, social inequality, the country's rural woes and a lack of
creativity and innovation were also risks, it added.
The United Nations says current life expectancy in China is around 72 years,
compared with around 82 years in Japan. About 200 million people in China live
below the poverty line while a child spends, on average, just over eight years
in school.
Large swathes of China are affected by chronic air pollution from factories,
vehicles and coal-burning power plants. Water and land pollution have poisoned
many other parts of the country.
Last month the China Modernization Report 2007 said that China had failed to
make any progress in protecting the environment in the past three years, despite
government pledges to put the issue at the top of its agenda.
China ranked 100 out of 118 countries in terms of environmental protection --
the same level as in 2004, the modernization report said.
But it said that by 2015, China's social and economic indicators should be on
par with developed countries in the 1960s, by which stage China would have moved
from an agrarian economy to an industrial one.
(Contributed by Reuters)