China has promised billions of extra dollars to lift struggling villages into prosperity, but it will take more than money to ensure that poor farmers ? and not just officials ? benefit, analysts said yesterday.

Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao told the national parliament on Sunday his government would invest at least 339.7 billion yuan ($42.3 billion) in the countryside this year ? about 453 yuan each for China?s 750 million or so rural residents ? with regular increases in coming years.

But China?s past attempts to raise rural well-being have repeatedly foundered due to misguided top-down goals and flagrant abuses, Zhang Ming, a rural expert at the People?s University of China, told Reuters.

?Local officials are now like a bunch of wolves circling a hunk of meat. You can?t expect them to act for the farmers? benefit,? he said.

?Past experience shows that whenever the government uses campaign-style development to address problems, especially in the countryside, the results are poor, even making matters worse,? he said.

While not all observers shared Zhang?s pessimism, many said that achieving the government?s plans for rural revival would hinge on far-reaching reform of rural government, cutting the number of farmers, and stringent measures to reduce corruption. ?Beijing is becoming like a massive aid donor,? said Stephen Green, senior economist for Standard Chartered Bank in China. ?It will face exactly the same problems as the World Bank faces aiding Third World countries.? The additional spending on the countryside will go to reducing school fees, improving healthcare, cutting local government staffing and debts, and raising agricultural productivity, the government said.

Possible failure

But officials and analysts said such programmes may fail, or entrap farmers in ?welfare dependency?, unless China reduces its overall rural population.

?The solution to China?s rural problems isn?t in fact in the countryside. The priority should be helping farmers move to cities,? said Mao Yushi, a well-known economist who favours market reforms.

Farmers now make up about two thirds of China?s 1.3 billion people, and that proportion has been shrinking at about 1 percent a year, he said. ?It?s possible to accelerate that rate by giving farmers better education, training and rights,? he said.

But farmers who remain in the countryside will still have over-staffed local governments that often turn to arbitrary taxes on farmers to pay their way, said rural experts. ?Local government needs to be transformed,? said Xu Yong, the director of the Centre for Chinese Rural Studies at Central China Normal University in Wuhan, central China. ?The current institutional arrangements were designed to take money from farmers; they?re not efficient at transferring money to them or providing services,? he said.

Rural corruption is often blamed on rapacious local cadres, but several experts said the central government?s own top-down programmes have often encouraged cash-strapped local governments to pursue wasteful and often corrupt showcase projects. ?The central government has been increasing transfer payments to rural issues every year, but because institutional reform hasn?t kept pace, the problems are shocking,? Li Changping, a Beijing-based rural expert wrote in the Study Times, a Beijing paper for Communist Party officials, yesterday.

Li estimated that China?s village and township government debt has been growing at over 20 billion yuan a year and now stands at over 500 billion yuan.

He gained nationwide fame in 2000 when he was rural party secretary in central China and wrote to then Premier Zhu Rongji decrying the exploitation of farmers. Yesterday, he described a scene that is little changed. ?All along the rungs of central fiscal transfers to the countryside, there are major problems with pilfering, misappropriation, withholding and diversion,? he wrote. ?One hundred yuan leaves Beijing, but only 30 is left when it reaches the village.?