Growing rich-poor divide tests China's boom

By Ben Blanchard

ANKANG, China (Reuters) - Tom Tang and Dong Mijuan represent the two opposite ends of one of China's most glaring social problems -- the growing gap between rich and poor.

Economic reforms over the past three decades may have lifted millions out of grinding poverty and helped fuel a rising middle class, but those effects have not been felt equally across the country.

When President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao came to power five years ago, they made narrowing that gap a priority, and it is certain to be an issue at the annual meeting of parliament which opens on Wednesday.

The stability-obsessed government worries that if this gap keeps growing, it will fuel social unrest and violence in the world's most populous nation, some 700 million of whose 1.3 billion people live in a vast and generally poor countryside.

In Ankang, a grimy city some 400 km (250 miles) south of Xian in the northwestern province of Shaanxi, 24-year-old Tang is one of the winners of China's bounding economic growth, despite his hometown's relatively remote location.

"I feel lucky that my family has had so much success," Tang, recently returned from study overseas, said in very passable English, standing outside a hotel his father's decoration company is fitting out.

"The rich here drive big cars and own two or three apartments. The poor can barely keep a roof over their heads or afford to send their children to school. The divide between the two is more and more obvious," he added.

Dong is at the other end of the scale.