Abstract

While China is stepping onto a new stage of development, its targets of reform and development are now open for reasonable readjustment. The promotion of social fairness and justice, together with the improvement of the well-being of the Chinese people, has become the starting points and the footholds of a more comprehensive reform. Thus the people's sense of well-being is becoming more and more important in current Chinese context. Based on the discussions over some basic issues related to well-being index, this report evaluates the objective well-being of the Chinese people from 2006 to 2010 by taking both the objective well-being index system and the official statistics into serious account. The research results show that the Chinese objective well-being has been greatly improved during“the Eleventh Five-Year Plan”. Compared with the year of 2006, the well-being of the Chinese increased 37.1% in 2010. The average annual growth turns out to be 9.3%. Within these five years, the social well-being and the environmental well-being increased 88.3% and 64.3% respectively. The differences of objective well-being among different provinces are quite distinguishable. There are wide gaps between the provinces with very high scores and those with very low scores. The highest score is about 3.5-4.5 times of the lowest one. Furthermore, the gaps within each detailed dimension are much more prominent, with the highest 6.5 times higher than the lowest. Observed on the regional level, the annual objective well-being shows the trend of a gradual decrease: the east winning the first prize, then the northeast, then the central, and finally the western. The biggest difference exists between the eastern region and the western region, followed by a milder gap between the eastern region and the central region. Gaps also exist between the northeast region and the western region, and of course between the eastern region and the northeast region. The gap between the northeast region and the central region, and that between the central region and the western region is the least obvious. From 2006 to 2010, the gap between the western region and other regions gradually became narrower and narrower. This report attempts to provide a more dynamic and more comprehensive evaluation of the progress of China during“the Eleventh Five-Year Plan”. It also aims to diagnose the major problems our society is confronted with in the process of reform and development, as well as to examine and to define how and to what degree the macroscopic public policies are affecting the objective well-being of the Chinese people.