ut it is strikingly clear that China's socialist market economy has quickly produced a bourgeoisie class. This category of people happens to have a powerful stake in the existing Communist order.Also visible and way more numerous are the 50 to 150 million peasants from economically depressed rural areas who have migrated to the cities in search of work. Living in shantytowns or simply on the streets, the fortunate ones work as low-paid laborers on round-the-clock construction sites. As most of us have observed on TV, young peasant women labor in sweatshops under oppressive conditions. Some are employed as servants, nannies, and housecleaners in the homes of urban professionals. The migrant workers are somewhat of a functional underclass in that they do the work that permanent residents of the city avoid. Just like their counterparts in other capitalist countries, such as ours, they serve to make life comfortable for the well off. One can easily say that the rapid development of the cities is partly due to the unlimited supply of cheap labor provided by rural immigrants. The distance between urban China's rich and its poor laborers is as wide a social gap as is likely to be found in any other capitalist country. It really doesn't matter if they are compared to developed or developing nations. During Mao Zedong's years as the leader of China, life in China was plain, to say the least. Most of the population walked around wearing the same blue jacket that Mao did. This was their way of conforming. Now, at the close of the Deng era, there are terrible extremes of wealth and poverty visible. The rapid social change is as remarkable as the rapid transformation of the economy. It is true, of course, that there were dramatic improvements in the living standards of the Chinese people during the reign of Deng Xiaoping. No matter how unequally distributed the gains and whatever the social costs, virtually all sectors of society and...
