A Stitch in Haste

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Attacks on Chinese policemen left 23 dead and 1,800 injured in the first half of this year, a Chinese security ministry spokesman has said.

The spokesman told the Beijing Youth Daily such attacks were on the rise.
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Correspondents say disputes between the public and the authorities are increasing over issues such as corruption and land grabs.

China's rapid economic development is widening the gap between rich and poor, and its by-products -- pressure on land and the environment -- is also taking its toll on China's average villager.

As I've blogged previously, people don't riot simply because they're poor. They riot because they're being oppressed.

China's so-called "capitalists" are political elites who rise to prosperity, and power, on the backs of disenfranchised masses, who are lucky even to be peasants, indeed lucky even to be alive, given China's penchant for slave labor and political imprisonment.

If China's totalitarians continue to insist that civil unrest is due to some "gap between rich and poor" gobbledygook, then that will only expose the hypocrisy of their "market communism" all the faster. If the rich are too rich, then why not confiscate their riches, like the communists they profess to be? Simple: because the totalitarians are the rich. And that facade is, as the increasingly frequent riots demonstrate, becoming harder to maintain.