Lesson 23 Is It Necessary to Keep the “Iron Rice Bowl”？
　　Text Living Without the “Iron Rice Bowl”Since 1987, reform of the Chinese labour system has stepped out of the laboratory and into the real world of employment. For many, the “ iron rice bowl ” no longer exlsts. The “ iron rice bowls ” - a Chinese euphemism¹ for government-assigned secure jobs that had been cherished for more than 30 years - were shattered. No accurate figure was available on how many workers have been laid off so far. But scattered² reports offer a glimpse of the scope of unemployment. In 1987, State-owned enterprises in Hubei Province laid off 14, 000 workers. Last summer, 30, 000 people in Shanghai were receiving unemployment pensions. The inauguration³ of a labour market at the Shenyang Steel Pipes Factory in Liaoning Province went unheraldedno firecrackers, no marching band, no bursts of applause. Instead of gaiety, weeping was heard at the perimeter⁴ of a small crowd of about 50 people witnessing the event.
　　Except for a few officials sitting at tables on the platform, everyone at the meeting had been laid off at the end of a work.optimization⁵ programme. They included labourers, cadres, technicians, Communist Party members, and even university graduates. The saddest were the eight ex-cadres who lost their executive jobs. Zhao yusheng, 46, was Party secretary of the No 2 workshop of the factory before he was laid off. He found another job on the labour market, loading and unloading trucks. He once served in the army and participated in battles. But this turn of events made him cry.
　　“For more than 20 years I had been doing what the Party asked me to do, ” he said. “Now on the labour market I find I do not have any skills. I can only become a truck loader.”For more than 30 years, unemployment in China has been regarded as an evil which labour planners have tried to avoid at all costs, The planners were once quite complacent⁶ about the solution——the “iron rice bowl”。 They were confident that a policy of “low salaries and broad employment” would end unemployment in China forever.
　　But the “ iron rice bowl ” system was a dead-end. Reluctantly,the planners.looked for another way.And even though it would cause pain and difficulties,they recommended a system that would permit laying off incompetent⁷ staff. That, they felt, would increase efficiency and give ailing⁸ enterprises a new lease on life. For workers affected⁹, lay-off is a bitter pill which some simply cannot swallow. For more than 30 years, Chinese people have felt totally secure in their jobs. Now they are facing the possibility of losing their jobs, and many have reacted with panic and horror.
　　Fu Gangzhan, director of the Economic Development Research Institute of the East China University of Chemistry, has studied China's labour problems for many years. Two summers ago Fu and his colleagues conducted a survey of several thousand workers and entrepreneurs in Shanghai. Their purpose was to unveil the reality of unemployment in China. During the same period, economics professor Tao Zhaipu of the Zhongshan University in Guangzhou was also studying the employment actualities in China.
　　They came to the same conclusion almost at the same time： unemployment exists and has always existed in China. They found that there was a core of unemployed¹⁰ numbering between 15 million to 25 million people in the country. This range is almost the same as the entire populations of Australia and Canada. Ulike unemployment in developed countries, unemployment in China is generally hidden from view.
　　The State spends 50 to 60 billion yuan （ $16.5 to $ 18.9 billion ） each year in the form of salaries, bonuses and other benefits supporting “iron rice bowl” workers who never actually earn a penny for their employers. This expenditure¹¹ accounts for about 50 per cent of the profits handed over to the State by all the enterprises in the country.
　　II. Read Read the following passages. Underline the important viewpoints while reading. 1. Breaking the “Iron Rice Bowl”In his effort to repair the damage of 30 lost years,Deng Xiaoping is abolishing what is called the “iron rice bowl” or “big-pot system”, which guaranteed that workers and peasants shared equal rewards regardless of their contribution. In its place, he has introduced “production responsibility”, which links remuneration to individual effort.
　　The dramatic impact of these reforms is most evident in rural China, home to more than 80 percent of the country's 1.1 billion people. A visit to a township outside Wuxi tells the story. The commune there, like most throughout China, has been dismantled¹². Instead of being assigned to jobs by a team leader and drawing equal shares from a common revenue pool as in the gast, the peasants contract to work a piece of land and to deLiver a quota¹³ of products to the state at a fixed¹⁴ price. What they produce above the quota they may keep for their own consumption or sel.l in a free market. They also are encouraged to caltivate bigger private plots and to engage in what are known as “sideline activities” to augment¹⁵ their incomes. The result is that the average household income has increased from about $ 225 a year to $ 350——$400. The most enterprising can earn many times that sum.
　　Lauded¹⁶ in the Chinese press as a model for all to follow is the chicken farmer who went into the egg business and amassed¹⁷ a fortune sufficient to enable her to buy China's first privately¹⁸ owned car, as well as two trucks for her enterprise. Everywhere the evidence of rising affluence¹⁹ - in Chinese terms—— is visible. In one town I visited, where hardly a new house had been built for 30 years, nearly 90 percent of the families have now moved into new accommodations. Most homes have radio-cassette players, and a majority have television sets acquired in the past year or so. Less than five years ago, such luxuries were unavailable.
　　In Nanjing, once the capital of the kouomintang government, a visitor sees another.aspect of the personal incentive²⁰ system. Business booms in a free market of hundreds of .individually operated stalls lining²¹ several narrow streets. On sale are vegetables, fruits, chickens and live fish and eels²². Buyers are many. Peasant merchants charge what the market will bear and keep what money they get. Are Communist leaders worried that all of this will lead to the emergence²³ of a new class of rich peasants'？ They insist they are not. “Some peasants prosper²⁴ early, others will prosper later,” says one official. I7eng puts it as a trickle-down theory： “Make some people rich first s0 as to lead all people to wealth.”

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