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403 pages, Hardcover
First published May 13, 2014
"Let some people get rich first and gradually all the people can get rich together." - Chairman Deng Xiaoping 1979
The difference in life expectancy and income between China’s wealthiest cities and its poorest provinces is the difference between New York and Ghana.
Two scholars, Yinqiang Zhang and Tor Eriksson, tracked the paths of Chinese families from 1989 to 2006 and found a "high degree of inequality of opportunity." ... They found that in other developing countries, parents’ education was the most decisive factor in determining how much a child would earn someday. But in China, the decisive factor was “parental connections.”
A separate study of parents and children in Chinese cities found "a strikingly low level of intergenerational mobility." Writing in 2010, the authors ranked "urban China among the least socially mobile places in the world."
The longer I lived in China, the more I sensed that the Chinese people have outpaced the political system that nurtured their rise. The Party has unleashed the greatest expansion of human potential in world history—and spawned, perhaps, the greatest threat to its own survival.
“We cast aside our three core ideas—Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism—and that was a mistake. We were taught Marxist revolutionary ideas from 1949 to 1978. We spent thirty years on what we now know was a disaster,” he said.
China punished many people for it; in a five-year stretch, China punished 668,000 Party members for bribery, graft, and embezzlement; it handed down 350 death sentences for corruption, and Wedeman concluded, “At a very basic level, it appears to have prevented corruption from spiraling out of control.”
"no evidence that the Chinese people are, on average, any happier. If anything, they are less satisfied than in 1990, and the burden of decreasing satisfaction has fallen hardest on the bottom third of the population in wealth. Satisfaction among Chinese in even the upper third has risen only moderately." Overall, they found, "economic growth is not enough; job security and a social safety net are also crtitical to people's happiness."Ah. Well, both Chinese and American officials could learn something from this.
"All websites are required to remove immediately the article entitled, 'In China, 94% Unhappy with Wealth Disproportionately Concentrated at the Top'".