GUANGZHOU (China) Eight years ago, Chen Hua thought she’d put poverty behind her when she left her remote, mountain village in Sichuan province for a factory job in China’s booming Pearl River Delta.

But even in one of the wealthiest and most dynamic parts of a country on the rise, she’s finding the dividends of China’s economic revolution do not always pay out.

Earlier this year, the garment workshop where she snipped dangling threads from clothes suddenly stopped paying wages. For several months, she and her colleagues kept working, hoping they would eventually be paid.

Then one day, the boss vanished and the factory closed.

Today, Chen, 53, hawks maps on a bridge near the Guangzhou train station in the capital of the southern province of Guangdong, where on a good day she earns 30 yuan ($3.72). For a time after the factory closed, she recycled trash for money.

“At least now I can stand in one place and don’t have to walk around all day,” she says with a stoic smile. When a policeman strolls down the ramp, though, she and the other vendors bolt the opposite way.

Fancy imported cars, five-star hotels and slick malls dot Guangzhou, the hub of a region that has blossomed into one of China’s — and the world’s — main economic engines.

But Chen stands by the train station as a reminder of one of the most dangerous features to develop on China’s socio-political landscape: the growing chasm between rich and poor in the world’s seventh-biggest economy.

Persistent poverty in China’s countryside, against the backdrop of fast growing cities, has sparked social unrest in some spots and elicited sympathy from the wider populace.

The public was outraged in 2003 when a driver in northeastern China ran over and killed a peasant with her BMW, but was given a light sentence.

The leadership in Beijing is deeply concerned there could be a wider backlash, threatening a decade of strong economic growth and the Communist Party’s grip on power, says Wenran Jiang, a China expert at the University of Alberta.

“They have come to the conclusion that ... the regime will not survive if they don’t address the growing wealth gap, and more importantly, the perception that the government only cares about economic growth and the urban rich,” he said.

When China’s late paramount leader Deng Xiaoping ignited the country’s market reforms in the late 1970s, he espoused a trickle-down approach, saying: “Let some people get rich first”.

Some have become gloriously rich. Next week, the Hurun Report, which tracks China’s wealthy, will issue its 7th annual China Rich List on which the average wealth for the richest top 400 is about $200 million. Seven are billionaires.—Reuters

KHARTOUM: Avelino Androga was one of the lucky ones. When civil war began to tear Sudan apart 50 years ago, his parents sent him across the border to Uganda, where he was able to go to school.

The fighting, which began soon after the country gained independence in 1956, robbed generations of an education and has left southern Sudan with an illiteracy level of more than 90 per cent. Figures published in 2003 show that of the eight million people living in the south (not including the estimated 4.5 million displaced by war), 1.4 million were of school age, but less than 20 per cent had access to an education. Little has changed since then.

All of which leaves Mr Androga — who returned to Sudan to teach after gaining a masters degree — and the organization he helped set up, the Needs Service Education Agency (NSEA), with the mammoth task of helping to mould an education system from nothing, now that a peace accord has been signed between the warring factions of the south and the Arab-dominated government in the north.

And the most important issue is training teachers. “We are the nation builders,” says Mr Androga. Years of war has left the south with no cash economy, which means there are no structures in place for education (or healthcare) and no money to pay or train teachers — some didn’t even make it through primary school.

Those who teach are volunteers, supported by the communities in which they work with gifts of food or practical help, such as digging up crops or sharing resources. —Dawn/The Guardian News Service