Gap between rich and poor in communist China is sowing seeds of resentment and terminal unrest

In this article, published just 7 weeks ago, I predicted that:

“Despite a rate of growth that is the envy of the world, China’s economy is, in fact, a ticking time bomb. Because the 1.3 billion people providing cheap labour to fuel its boom represent mushrooming fuel demands that portend its bust.”

I also stated that:

“…the affectations of modernity and freedom in China’s big cities are designed to divert attention from the feudal, barren and collectivized rural areas where most of its billion plus people still reside.”

The irony is that the great proletarian revolution Karl Marx predicted for capitalist societies is brewing in communist China. Specifically, urban sprawl is supplanting rural areas and further alienating poor farmers (who have seen only hardship from this economic boom). These simmering tensions between the ‘haves’ and the ‘have-nots’ will inevitably cause China to implode.

Images (like this one) depicting village riots, which are erupting all over China, must be taken surreptitiously. Because, even though they allow more freedom of commerce these days, Chinese leaders still forbid freedom of the press. Yet one can get a sense of these simmering tensions from reports by China’s own ministry of propaganda. For it confirmed earlier this year that the “number of riots has risen sharply in China, reaching more than 70,000 in 2004 and developing into a major concern for the government.”

Therefore, I was not at all surprised by the report in yesterday’s Washington Post that:

“The rebellion to protest the confiscation of the villagers’ land for a new power plant attracted thousands of defiant villagers who clashed with riot troops and People’s Armed Police, resulting in gunfire and bloodshed.”

Unprecedented urban development, at mach speed, cannot be fueled by rice farming. Moreover, where limited energy resources are likely to cause the relatively stable American economy to contract in due course, fuel shortages compounded by widespread rebellion amongst poor, gentrified and disaffected farmers are clearly sowing the seeds of China’s economic destruction.

The government will continually mount Sisyphean efforts to keep this cauldron of tensions from boiling over. But I fear this will lead inexorably to a crackdown that will make the massacre at Tiananmen Square look like a Sunday picnic.

Here’s how peasant farmer Yao Min from the Guizhou Province describes the politics that are breeding so much resentment amongst villagers:

“Both our children have left the village to work in the cities. The central government leaders just care about themselves – not about the masses, not about the people. The local officials only pay attention to the one child policy, so that they can collect fines from those who have more than one child. If families don’t have enough money to pay, they take things from their houses. If we become sick this will be a disaster for the family.”

Stay tuned…

Note: Many delegates at the recent Montreal Global Warming Summit (including former U.S. President Bill Clinton) berated the United States for doing so little to curb the emission of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Meanwhile, another combustible side effect of China’s rapid development is its emission of greenhouse gases that makes what the U.S. emits look like the relatively harmless smoke from one puff of a cigarette!

Indeed, what you see hovering over Yao Min’s head in this picture is not smoke from a camp fire (or the riots); it’s smog from industrial development…

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