【正文】
We have previously looked at some issues relating to regional disparities in China. Previous discussion will not be repeated but some major propositions will be reviewed before we proceed further. The first point to note is that as development has occurred in China over the last thirty years, growth has been quite uneven when looked at in regional terms. The greatest growth has been in the coastal provinces, not in the interior. Growth in the coastal provinces, in fact, has been the driving force for the national growth experienced since 1980. Thus, a significant gap has opened up between the richest region and the rest of the country. This gap can be seen in the level of GDP/capita in different regions as well as the rate of growth, employment levels, migration patterns, infrastructure development, etc. These gaps are significant and they are important. In 2020, per capita GDP in various provinces was – ? Qinghai 14257 yuan ? Zhejiang 37411 yuan ? Jiangsu 33928 yuan ? Fujian 25908 yuan ? Guandong 33151 yuan Part of what makes these regional disparities important is that they indicate the unevenness of the growth and development that has taken place and the fact that a failure to address them could create or contribute to a rising level of citizen dissatisfaction with the gains from growth or at least the way those gains are distributed. The hukou system, which is the household registration system, is a potentially important point to consider in looking at regional disparities. When we looked at the socalled neoclassical model of regional adjustment, we saw that in a perfectly functioning market system, with perfect labour mobility, regional disparities will be eliminated by workers moving from low wage regions to high wage regions. This adjustment mechanism does not solve the problem becaus