Critical Reflection: My Academic Writing

It is coming to the end for my ES1102 journey. Although this module added a lot of workloads in my timetable, it really helps me to improve my English. Initially, i thought this is a typical language learning lesson which is dry and boring. but i was wrong, it is not fun but enjoyable when i really paying attention to it and i learned something at the end.

Ms Anita Toh is very friendly and willing to help us to improve our English. with her help, I learned how to write a proper review comment or an academic essay/report. I also learned grammars, subject-verb agreement, APA referencing and many other more from the lesson. The one of bigger hints for me that help to write an essay is planning. I had suffered a lot of times that stuck in the middle of essay writing because I used to start my essay writing without planning.

English or other modules that require me to write essay or report will be my weakest subject. There are a lot of things that i need to improve like; grammars, vocabulary, spelling, word choices and sentence structure, but i good at generating ideas and  do critical thinking on analyzing things. Tutor feedback and conferencing really helped me a lot because they pointed out my mistakes and i can correct my mistake. My plan for improving my English is to read more books, newspaper and watch some lesson that posted on Youtube. Of cause, i do need more practices on my own to further enhance my English writing.

ES1102 is not fun but an enjoyable module. I would like to thank Ms Anita Toh for teaching us patiently and willing to guide us along throughout the module, I am the person that will feel very happy whenever there is an improve in any field, even the improvement is very small. I do learn a lot from this module, and i hopes that i can improve more in the future.

Problem Solution Essay Final: Globalization and Income Inequality in China

Income inequality has increased rapidly due to the negative impact of globalization, which involved a huge amount of international trade and migration, in which the wage of low-skilled workers is decreasing as over surplus of workers and less demand on their skill. According to a new Oxfam report (2016), the 62 richest people in the world own as much wealth as the poorest half of the world population. And also, the wealth from top 1 percent owns more than the poorer 99 percent in 2015 (Oxfam, 2016). Therefore, the gap between the rich and the poor is getting wider. This essay will first briefly describe the relation between globalization and income inequality in China, examine its impacts, evaluate the current measures for the issue and suggest some methods to improve the current solution.

There are many reasons that increase income disparity in China. “Let some people and some region get rich first” was first introduced by the country’s former leader Deng Xiaoping. This policy has played a huge role that unshackled China’s economic development, and it created super growth and a plenty of tycoons today. However, it has caused the income inequality to increase rapidly in the past three decades. While globalization is promoting China’s economic growth, it also worsened the income inequality. Globalization may not be the main reason which causes income inequality, but it does widen the gap between the rich and the poor in China.

There are three types of income inequality in China are regional inequality, urban-rural inequality, and inter-industrial inequality. Regional inequality is measured by the ratio of worker’s wages at different regions (Li, 2010). For example, according to China statistical yearbook (National Nureau of Statistics of China, 2014), the ratio of income per capita between east and west area had increased to 1.39 in 1999 from 1.26 in 1990. Urban-rural inequality has contributed more than 10 percent of total inequality of China. For instance, according to China statistical yearbook 2014, the average income from urban is more than triple of their rural counterparts in 2013 (National Nureau of Statistics of China, 2014). Inter-industrial inequality is due to the technologies transferring and the capital inflows, the wages of the low-skilled worker does not grow as much as the high-skilled worker.

Income inequality caused several negative impacts which include: social instability and conflicts, the negative effect of economic growth, hampers poverty reduction (Kochhar, Ricka, Suphaphiphat, Tsounta, & Norris, 2015). For example, on 1 March 2014, a group of terrorist attacks a railway station in the Chinese city of Kunming. In this attack, it caused 29 civilians and 4 perpetrators dead, more than 140 others injured. The attacker came from a terrorist group called “East Turkistan”, which active in the junction area between the east side of Turkistan and west side of Xinjiang province in China. The majority members of this group are Muslim Uighur in Xinjiang, and there are a lot of reasons why they wanted to join “East Turkistan”. The two of main reasons are: this group of people has low income and they believe government treated them differently compare to main race Han in China (Smith, 2014).

One current solution to minimize income inequality is a subsistence allowance system named Di Bao. Di Bao is a social welfare program, which mainly focuses on cash subsidy, for the poor local registered permanent residents. The residents are eligible for the program if their family income per capital is lower than the minimum local living standard.  This program had covered about 74.9 million people including 23.1 million in the urban area and 51.8 million in the rural area (Li, 2013). Although Di Bao is a huge program and it covered a large number of people who are still in extreme poverty, this program has insufficient impact on reducing the income gap.

The Di Bao system has some limitations which restrict its effectiveness for helping the poor. Firstly, Di Bao program’s benefits are insufficient. The objective of this program is to fill in the gap between household income and a certain threshold if any household per capita income is under the threshold. Therefore, it increases the household income to the threshold. But this threshold is set at a level far too low, which is 20 percent to 25 percent of the local average income (Li, 2013). The Chinese government should immediately increase the amount of subsistence and then update the threshold to a reasonable level. Secondly, Di Bao program is strictly limit to the local registered permanent residence, poor migrant households are excluded from the local Di Bao program (Li, 2013). For example, when a migrant worker migrates from rural area to urban area, his or her income is generally higher than the average income in the rural area, but may be lower than the average income in the urban area. He or she cannot receive benefits from the either Di Bao program as he or she is not fulfilling the requirements. Therefore, the Di Bao system should be flexible enough for new migrants to join into the local Di Bao system respectively after some number of years, e.g. 5 years. In this situation, after those migrants joined to the local Di Bao system, they will quit the original Di Bao system from the place they came. Hence, there will be no duplicated benefits for the same person.

Since China’s economic reformation and opening up, globalization has worsened income inequality in China. Subsequently, the income inequality caused many problems such as: increases social instability and conflicts, slows down the economic growth, hampers poverty reduction. The current solution Di Bao system does not reduce income inequality efficiently. Hence, the Di Bao system needs to be more flexible and increase its coverage to include all the situations that the poor needs help.