A widening income gap that threatens to tear China apart is likely to be a top item on the agenda when the National People's Congress kicks off its annual full meeting next weekend.

The 3,000 NPC delegates will be meeting just as tensions between the haves and the have-nots seem to be reaching a critical level.

"China's leaders certainly accord priority to the maintenance of political and social stability," said City University of Hong Kong's Joseph Cheng.

Signs are multiplying that society is unraveling at the seams, especially in rural areas where 715 million people are groaning under the twin weights of abusive officialdom and economic growth a fraction of that in the cities.

Forty million farmers have lost their land as ever larger areas are appropriated for industrial and residential uses, and many are enraged over what they see as inadequate compensation.

"A lot of the older peasants, how can they find other employment? They have lost their land, they have no money, they have no social security, they cannot find jobs. There are bound to be serious, serious social problems," Cheng said.

Beijing has promised to help the farmers, and Premier Wen Jiabao's annual work report, to be delivered on the first day of the NPC gathering this Sunday, could provide clues about what exactly it plans to do.

A clearer indicator of how much it is willing to spend on the problem could emerge in the budget to be unveiled by Finance Minister Jin Renqing early in the series of meetings.

Rural issues may also be a focus for the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference that begins meeting Friday.

The 11th five-year plan that kicks off this year will be on the NPC agenda. The plan, an ambitious piece of social engineering, will help determine which regions get what and how much, setting the stage for heated rivalry.

Against this backdrop, observers will also be looking for signs at the NPC of developing fissures in the leadership.

In a closed system such as China's, competing politicians never fight it out in the open, and personal rivalries often take the form of deceptively principled debates on policy.

For instance, the entire argument about speeding up development of rural areas is seen by some as a reflection of an emerging leadership split.

"For sure, President Hu Jintao is pushing for rural issues to be at the front," said Gilles Guiheux, director of the Hong Kong-based French Center for Research on Contemporary China.

"The other side, especially local leaders in the coastal provinces, are saying more funds transferred from prosperous areas to poor areas might jeopardize economic development."

But Hu and his colleagues will not allow their disagreements to spin out of control.

They all remember how a divided leadership severely impaired crisis management during the 1989 Tiananmen protests.

Sources: China Business Newspaper