China raised gas prices twice in less than six weeks to new heights. Since the beginning of this year, the price of petrol and diesel has soared by 900 yuan per tonne, equivalent to around 150 US dollars, hitting a record high.
Public transport is one of the industries that were worst hit by the price increase. A truck driver who runs goods delivery has the complaints.
"It really is having a great impact, in terms of cost. Our team has dozens of trucks. If one litre costs an extra half a yuan and each truck takes over 400 litres of diesel, then we lose 200 or 300 yuan for each vehicle. So we lose around 10,000 yuan before a job's even finished. Think how many tens of thousands we lose in one year."
Since January 2012, China's Ministry of Finance has allocated more than 100 billion yuan to subsidize agricultural industry, an amount of thirty percent increase compared to 2011. And another 67 billion yuan is used for fishery, forestry and public transport.
Officials from the ministry said more subsidies will be given out to the oil-consuming industries after the recent price hike.
Wang Zhen, a researcher from China University of Petroleum said the subsidy will alleviate the devastating impact on oil-consuming industries.
"Oil price hikes will lead to a rising expenditure in energy consumption and also a soaring cost of farming resources and also raw materials in manufacturing industry. Subsidies will better protect the rights and interests of farmers. For example, extra money will go directly into farmers' pockets so as to compensate for the losses due to the rising fertilizer price.
Yu Bin from the Development Research center of China's State Council has predicted the oil price in the global market will keep steady in a certain period of time.
"I can rule out the possibility of a large increase in oil price on the global market for the rest of this year since there will be a lasting reduction of demands for petroleum due to a shrinking market for consumption goods."
Yu Bin added that China's CPI or Consumer Price Index might go up since the raw materials are more expensive. He said China has set up a mechanism to make commodity price and subsidy interlinked. Once CPI keeps rising for a certain period of time, subsidies will be offered for the disadvantaged group, such as the disabled, the jobless and the low-income earners.
For CRI, this is Wei Tong.
