A Stitch in Haste

In case you're tempted to think that China is anything other than a brutal Communist dictatorship because of its so-called "embracing" of capitalism, guess again:

In a generation, China's ascetic, egalitarian society has acquired the trappings and the tensions of America in the age of the robber barons. A rough-and-tumble form of capitalism is eclipsing the remnants of socialism. Those who have made the transition live side by side with those who have not, separated by serrated fences and the Communist Party.

The party's Central Committee conducted a survey of party officials in November in which the widening income gap ranked as the biggest concern, mainly because it stirs social unrest. Farm incomes were raised this year after emergency rural tax cuts. The government has tried to slow land confiscations. But officials have chosen not to give peasants control over the land they farm, effectively denying them a share in the new market economy.

Meanwhile, the fleet footed and well connected have profited from surging exports, a bubbly urban real estate market and, occasionally, government boosterism.

Sure it's great to be a Chinese "capitalist." It was also great to be a Soviet apparatchik. And I'm sure Fidel Castro's inner circle eat, drink and smoke very nicely.

Give the whole piece a read, especially the parts about how the Chinese "capitalists" are almost exclusively from the Communist Party elite and how the bureaucrats attempt to mollify the peasants with optimistic but vague promises of job creation from state-sanctioned real estate mega-projects. Where have we heard...that...before?

Just because a country has "capitalists" doesn't mean it's a capitalist country.

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