Quote:
Originally Posted by Baraka_Guru
So what you have in China is a somewhat oppressive communist government, in addition to class stratification based on the changes under economic reform. You have the urban filthy rich, and you have the rural destitute.
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The separation in living standards between what you call the urban filthy rich and the rural destitute is not as great as that difference in the US. It is interesting in my view that the hundreds of millions of people in China considered rural and impoverished actually control farm-able land. they may not have access to many of the commercial goods western nations have come to expect, but given access to land that they control they are less dependent on the state than the poor in the US.
Perhaps an alarming trend, similar to what happened in the US with the demise of the family farm, in China rural farmers are loosing control of their farm-able land to corporate interests. This may be a misstep in the context of living standards for the poor as they will grow dependent on government and corporate interests and will only have cheep unskilled labor to offer. This trend is moving at a faster pace than the nations ability to educate the rural poor.